


The White Moth Augury

by crocodilepatronus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drug Use, Minor Violence, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-08 08:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5490377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crocodilepatronus/pseuds/crocodilepatronus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neville is spending winter holidays at Hogwarts, nearly alone in the castle with the exception of the company of Severus Snape. While experimenting with hallucinogenic and magical plants, and greatly suspicious of Snape’s trustworthiness, Neville makes a discovery that changes both of their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hollows & Spores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Are](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Are/gifts).



> consider this a fanfiction of a fanfiction. takes place in a non canon compliant AU created by are-are with characterization by are-are. pretty much all of the ideas are hers and one day she will publish a much better fic in this universe because I KNOW she’s written it even if it’s just in her head. I borrowed her ideas and wrote a plot of my own so the events in the story are mine.

It had all begun with the nosebleed. Or atleast, that’s roughly where he **_estimated_** it had started. Though unlike in stories with a set beginning and ending, in life it was very hard to say when something really started without retracing one’s steps a million times over, trying to find clues that one had overlooked, omens that had portended the current state of events, and prologues in one’s childhood.

But in any event it had come to the beginning, or maybe from another view the climax, during the winter months of Neville’s second year teaching at Hogwarts.

Neville was one of the few professors who had stayed on the campus during the winter holidays which left not much to do with his time other than experiment with as many hallucinogenic and mood altering herbs and plants as his health would allow.

Neville always kept his experimental and recreational use of magical plants as a hobby and not one that ever interfered with his professional life. If he smoked Dizzycot leaf or took a few extracted drops of Sagatbloom cactus in his spare time it was in the privacy of his own room and he reckoned that made it his own business and no one else’s.

That being said, it didn’t change that the use of mystical herbs for recreation was frowned upon by most of the wizarding community. So Neville had to keep his hobby as private as possible.

He went to great pains to make sure the ‘symptoms’ of his habit were never visible. He’d use charms to remove the smell of smoke or potion from his clothes, a dropper of African crocodile tears always willed away any tell-tale redness or discoloration in his eyes, he even used a mouth rinse of nernroot extract to get rid of the traces of some of the plants he took which made his mouth and lips turn bright colors.

His natural tendency to stumble over his words and to maintain little presence in a room of people lended itself well to blending in even at the highest points of his delusions and stimulations.

Neville had yet to be caught, even from the keen eyes of McGonagall, though he thought she might suspect him.

Another factor in how Neville managed to keep his job was that simply put there weren’t many alternative options for a herbology teacher. If there had been, Neville, who was only 22 and never formally learned to teach, would not have been chosen. There was a war going on. The number of students still enrolled at Hogwarts was greatly diminished. And Professor Sprout herself had left her teaching post to be with family abroad. All things being considered, Neville was generally regarded as being very good at his job. He was well liked among his students- he was young enough that they didn’t fully regard him as an ‘adult’ which worked in his favor in terms of popularity though not always in his ability to keep the chaos of the classroom in check. Furthermore, Neville himself seemed to benefit as much as his students. Whatever awkardness or shyness he’d had when he himself was a student seemed to have in part been cured by mustering his strength to speak in front of a class everyday. On most days he barely stuttered or had to wipe the sweat off his palms on his pants legs at all.

The ‘children’ in his classes (because now they were supposed to be ‘children’ to him though some of them weren’t much younger than him) were frightened by the war. Part of their admiration for Neville came from knowing he was a ‘close personal friend of Harry Potter’ who was off doing something unspeakably mysterious and heroic far away from Hogwarts. Horrifyingly, many of the students came to Neville for advice or emotional support.

He wasn’t sure what to say to them. And even after he’d said something, and they seemed soothed by it, he could barely recall what it was exactly that he’d said. But he knew it was from the heart.

Ultimately Neville was a post-war child. He didn’t remember the last war but he’d grown up amongst the very recent remnants of it. That in itself is a traumatizing experience. And with the new wizarding war upon them, he couldn’t help but feel that in some ways being in the midst of the war was better than being born into the aftershock of it. At least with the war happening, one could direct their energies somewhere. There was a sense of purpose, of rallying, of righteousness; even in the wake of tragedies.

After the war is when the strength is allowed to crumble. People’s shield of anger let down leaving them with only grief. It’s only when things go back to normal that you realize how many blank spaces have been blown into that normal life you’d led before.

When he’d been very young, there were still many houses and shops in the wizarding world that were destroyed or damaged from the war. Broken windows and abandoned buildings, doors with enchanted locks wrapped all the way round them for protection, men on street corners selling ‘used wands’ and trinkets… For a very long time, Neville hadn’t realized that any of these things were abnormal. He’d assumed that was just how the world looked. How it was. How it had always been.

And to grow up in that, without even knowing that those blank spaces hadn’t always been there, had led Neville even at a young age to have a very pervasive sense of uneasiness. He’d barely known his parents as a child. While he knew it wasn’t normal, it had always been normal for _him_. The ritual of visiting them in the hospital, receiving cryptic words of confused affection which he’d stay up at night trying desperately to make sense of, was just one of many idiosynchronicities between himself and other boys his age.

A post war child through and through- essentially orphaned by soldier parents, timid and overly humble, and born with a sense of incompleteness. No, he had all his limbs in tact and it wasn’t something he spent much time agonizing over. But he had often wondered if like the shops with the broken windows that he and everyone else had been too hasty in assuming he was normal when perhaps there was something fundamentally and significantly missing from him. Some essential part deep inside him unseen by doctors or to the naked eye. Maybe in his brain or maybe in his stomach for all he knew. But something, somewhere, that made the sum of him less than the sum of others. He thought this lacking might be what handicapped him so much in magic compared to his peers.

Many different people on many occasions had suggested what qualities or traits Neville seemed to be lacking- “no self esteem” , “no common sense” , “no skills to speak of” etc. These all very well may have been true but strangely, simply identifying them didn’t provide any help.

Now, the post-war child was engulfed in war. And as usual, he felt out of place.

Part of the appeal of staying at Hogwarts was the isolation. He had a hate/love relationship with it. He could go hours, sometimes even days, forgetting completely that not too far away there were Death Eaters killing wizards and muggles alike. Neville wasn’t sure if it was a good thing that he could forget that, or if it was a bad thing. But he did. It was too easy to fall into a routine at Hogwarts and the routine was already so overly familiar. He woke up, he had breakfast, he taught classes, graded papers, tended to the greenhouse, and all the while he wasn’t saving a single person, wasn’t defeating any evil force.

Sometimes things just seemed so still at Hogwarts. And he knew this would only be exacerbated when the castle emptied for the holidays. Maybe that was why he’d been so overcome with a sudden feeling of panic when he’d dismissed his students on their last day of class. His voice had cracked and all at once he was sure he was going to have a heart attack. Especially because they were already leaving- haphazardly shoving quills and books into their bags and jogging for the door. While he stood with his palm flat against his desk, struggling not to collapse onto the floor. He’d experienced that before- the tightness in his chest that seemed to constrict his lungs so urgently that he couldn’t even muster his voice to speak. But he’d realized then how selfish it would have been to speak anyway. He wasn’t sure what he would’ve said, had he found the ability, but what he would’ve wanted to say would be “please just come back. stay here a moment longer.” He was too old to be asking for help, though. And the world was in a state where cries for help went unanswered. Especially ones as insignificant as his own.

Neville told himself he’d devote the winter holidays to working with his plants. He’d convinced himself that something good could come from that. A plant that could kill Lord Voldemort maybe. A plant to make Harry Potter invincible. If he kept thinking that way, overly optimistic and grandiose, if he could manage that state of mind for at least a few hours per day, he thought he could grind up the motivation to do something productive.

But he was deeply concerned about the solitude.

With all the students gone, the castle felt abandoned. And the one person whose living quarters was closest to his own was the one person he wanted to avoid at all costs- professor Snape.

\- - -

Neville woke up freezing cold and on the floor, sheets and one blanket still tangled around his curled up body.

It wasn’t unusual for this to happen. Recently, he slept very fitfully. Though he almost never remembered his dreams, he always awoke feeling uneasy- practically nauseous even, with the ghost of some feeling of terror that had visited him in the night. And on his lower back, he could feel goosebumps still raised. Though he wasn’t sure if this was from his dreams or if it was from the temperature.

He longed for the warmth and comfort of the Gryffindor dormitory. The bedroom he occupied in the room adjoining his office was more remote and drafty. This was a problem not only for his own comfort but the comfort of the large number of plants housed in mismatched pots and vases (and one even in a cage, for his own safety) that cluttered the small space, filling every shelf and surface. He had to recast many warming spells around them, wrapping them in a protective bubble of whatever temperature and humidity was most suited for their growth and uptake.

Aside from the plants, the room was messy but a bit impersonal. Unlike some of the boys he’d gone to school with, Neville had never known much about Quidditch and never put up posters of any favored team. He didn’t have any posters of musicians or portraits of family and friends to decorate the walls either. The only semblance of a wall ‘decoration’ was the Iridis Ivy he’d allowed to get out of control and now crept along half the wall, which turned every shade of color in cycles per hour like a pulse running through a vein.

Because the room was on the edge of a tower, it had a rounded shape and one large lancet window that went nearly from floor to ceiling looked out at the school grounds. In spring, the sunshine from it in the mornings was overpowering. In winter, morning and night both seemed to creep up silently in neutral grays that faded into black or white, but rarely blue.

The white light of the cloudless morning sky seemed unbearable against his eyes and he pulled his comforter off the bed and wrapped it further around himself so only the top of his head stuck out the top of the cocoon.

He remembered with a sense of dread that he had no place to be, no one to see, and nothing to do.

Neville sighed and reached one arm out to his left, fumbling in the ice cold space beneath his bed until his fingers wrapped around something smooth and glass.

There was still some leftovers from his previous smoke in the bowl of the pipe, glistening a beautiful burnt orange like a sunset and smelling like a sickening mix of brown sugar and paint. It was a hassle to make the extract- it required several charms and a potion which had taken him three tries to brew correctly.

Neville thought it fairly ironic. The wizarding world was full of magic that muggles never in their wildest dreams could’ve imagined. But to use any type of drug or plant to change things, to make them even more magical, more fantastical, was seen as an attempt to escape from reality.

Neville himself felt ambivalent about reality.

Somehow it didn’t feel as interactive as he would like it to be. He had many thoughts, he felt, that in reality he could not express. Things didn’t turn out right. He wanted to be brave, strong, capable, smart, confident- but somehow that will got lost on the way to his mouth, to his body, never fully realizing itself in his behaviors and life. It was like the deeper parts of his mind were controlling a vessel that had not been fully configured to move to his desires.

But the fantastical, hallucinated, world was much different. Neville’s actions there were not passive- he created his surroundings as he went, the space between dream and reality blurring and dissapearing entirely.

He’d smoked things that had made everything both look and feel as if he were underwater, he’d had draughts that let him see ripples come out of his fingertips with everything he touched, he’d even swallowed seeds that supposedly made one able to read others thoughts though all he’d heard were loud jumbles of words and noises and music everytime he’d looked someone in the eye which he couldn’t make out into any type of logical pattern.

He wasn’t escaping. He was **_enhancing_**.

He found his wand under the pillow he hadn’t slept on and mumbled a quick _accendit_ under his breath, sparking a tiny flame at the tip. He brought the glass pipe to his lips and the flame over the bowl of burnt orange tar and sucked in. Inhaled until his lungs were tight and burning. When he exhaled, the smoke felt like liquid pouring out his throat, almost making him retch. He smelled sugar. And then the walls began to melt. And as he looked down at his hands the skin on his fingertips began to drip off the bone.

\- - -

Neville ate breakfast at 3 PM in his green house. In his years as a student the great hall had continued to operate during the winter holidays but this was the first year where there weren’t regularly scheduled meals as nearly all of the meager remains of the student body who still attended had gone home. It was awkward to have to go to the kitchen and request food to take away and then bring the dishes back later. The house elves made a rather large fuss whenever a wizard came in.

He never needed to water the plants, they were all connected to glass orbs that were enchanted to water them at regular times and the ceiling of the house was enchanted to provide different amounts of sunlight or shade to different areas. It was a peaceful place to be and Neville found that if left to his own devices he could lose hours of time holed up like a recluse in the green house with his plants.

Another altered reality, he thought.

He was poring over a book he’d found in the restricted section of the library- “The Fantasy Seer’s Guide to Spiritual Herbs and Fungi” by Madame Dizzeria Potspeck. The inside cover had a picture of the woman with deeply tanned skin, a wild mane of purple hair, and tattoos covering her arms and collarbones. She smiled serenely though her head seemed to be wobbling unbalanced on her shoulders and she’d occasionally turned to smell the large red flowers in the background of her photo.

There was a list showing the names of people who had previously taken the book out- it seemed once every few years some bold soul had borrowed it and Neville guessed many were underage students from the mostly fake names scribbled inside: in the 1960s was when it seemed to have gotten the most traffic but as recently as 1987 by “Bossman Tybereus”, 1984 it was taken out by an alleged “Hugh G. Dildeaux", 1975 by the “Half Blood Prince”, and in 1969 by “Maryjane Lover”.

Neville turned the pages with marmalade stained fingers leaving a sticky trail in his wake.

_Lunaessera Viscum: a lovely flower that only blooms under a full moon. It has luminous white petals that are soft to the touch. When the petals are brewed in a tea and the tea is stirred counterclockwise twelve times with a wand, it produces a heady substance that imbues the drinker with special powers. Their skin will glow like moonlight even in a dark room for several hours and their body will feel very light. My wife and I tried this tea for the first time last summer and the effects of it can only be described as total rapture. The body becomes weightless, the mind unimpended. We danced for ten hours in the nude on our lawn when both of us could’ve sworn it had only been ten minutes. I was sure we connected with the spirit of the moon and gained deep harmony with nature that night…_

Neville scratched the nape of his neck absently (sticky- his fingers were still sticky. he felt it clinging to the back of his neck..) and turned the page. The next full moon wouldn’t be for weeks. It seemed that many of the most powerful potions and herbs had to be imbued or harvested at specific times and dates. There was something important, he felt, about the ritual of it. Charms and transfiguration were straightforward, precise, almost procedural. But he’d found that in herbology and potions, there was an ettiquette to it that seemed arbitrary but that was where the revelation was invoked. In the precise minutes, the turns of the wrist, in the conviction that it _mattered_ \- a handful of bone dust taken from a doe killed in spring and not winter, rolling the buds of a plant between your fingertips when they’re cold and not warm, picking the flower with the left hand and not the right… these things were of the utmost importance.

Neville had never been able to master the finesse of this type of detail work when he’d done it for a grade in a classroom. He hated being timed, he hated being watched as he worked, and most of all hated the looming presence of Snape standing behind him ready to criticize his every move. But alone, and in his own pace, with the right motivation, he sometimes successfully pulled off even very difficult potions to go on one of his fantasy journeys.

 _So take that, proffessor Snape_ …

Neville took a sip of tea and continued scanning the pages of Dizzeria’s book.

Csinpine. There were several pages on Csinpine. Dizzeria tended to ramble and what started as an instructive guide to how to properly crush the needles into a powder had quickly devolved into a long winded tale about her experiences using it, how she’d first discovered its properties when living with a colony of Welsh pixies in a woodland hollow for four months. Neville, though he had to admit he was quite fond of Dizzeria’s stories, had become quite adept at skimming her work for relevant information. He had two small Csinpine trees in the greenhouse though he’d never thought they could have any type of opiate properties- the sap could be used in a potion that made skin invulnerable to heat and flames.

Neville had to use gloves and a small knife to cut off a sprig off the plant. The needles had a scaly quality to them but they were sharp- very sharp. It made a terrible noise when he ground it with his pestle. The process was slow going. His arms were aching by the time it had been crushed into a fine, bright green, powder.

Removing his gloves, he ran the tips of his fingers against the top of the small mound. He gave one final look at Dizzeria’s instructions. Dumped the mortar into the palm of his hand, then took a breath and blew out, scattering the powder to the air. It hung suspended, every fiber lit up with sunlight for just a moment as Neville leaned forth, sticking his face into the small cloud and inhaled deeply through his mouth and nose until the powder dissipated through the air.

The effects were not immediate. He sat for several minutes wondering if he’d done something wrong- made the powder too fine or not breathed in deeply enough.

Then he began to feel it. It was subtle at first. His face tingled and he had to keep rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. Why not with his fingers? He couldn’t feel them at all. He looked down and they were there. But somehow they felt detatched from the rest of him. And he wasn’t quite sure what the rest of him was anyway. His skin felt strange and rippling.

He arched his back. It really did feel as though something was going to grow out of him at any minute- his ribs maybe. They felt like they were bending, just ready to pierce out the skin of his back and reform like a series of prehensile spider legs.

He knew at once that he had to find a mirror.

He stumbled out of the greenhouse, one hand clawing at the wall for support as he attempted to make his way back to his bedroom. His legs barely worked underneath him, curving and arching like the hindquarters of a beast. His skin felt hot, irritable, like fur was bristling just beneath the flesh and rising steadily to the surface.

But he was arrested down the hall when he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window. In the dark winter afternoon, he could make his appearance out clearly in the glass and he stopped, stunned, pressing his fingertips against the cold surface.

He looked exactly the same.

There was nothing unusual about his features, his eyes weren’t even red or watering. He warily felt his own face with his hand, dragging his fingernails lightly across his jawline to test if he could feel the claw-like appendetures he imagined were growing there. There was nothing. It made him break out in a cold sweat.

He raked both hands through his hair, scratching feverishly at his skull. No horns! But he could’ve sworn-

His clothes were too tight, too warm. They felt like a nest of snakes constricting against him. He tugged at his collar, ran his hands through his hair once more. It was a nightmare.

Then somebody screamed, and to Neville’s surprise, it wasn’t him.

The scream came again, louder and drawn out. It was a girl’s voice. A student.

Neville whirled around from the (disturbing) sight of his reflection and began striding down the hall in earnest. If he shut his eyes tightly he could feel leathery wings weighing down his back, parting and catching the air behind him in his pace. His legs still felt disconnected and it was dificult to move but he slapped his own face several times, blinking and willing himself to just _be normal_. He had to be.

Whatever effects the drug had had, certainly one of them seemed to be dulling his ability to worry. Not panic, but worry which was very different. He felt panic surely enough. His heart was hammering in his chest and he could feel a clammy sweat collecting behind his ears. His mind, however, was still. It wasn’t racing with the possibilities of what the scream meant- it had only one goal in mind and his body in turn, doggedly pursued it despite his impediment.

Through reality or by his imagination, he felt his hearing was sharper. His ears- larger. Expanding like an elephants’ and then curling into themselves like cones turned upward, sensitive to even the rustling of dust on the hallway floors.

He turned, pacing then going back, scratching the back of his neck then turning again, following his instinct. There hadn’t been another scream after the first two and his brain was pounding with attempts to recollect as vividly as possible where the noise may have originated from.

Keep it together, some faint still lucid voice told the beast that had taken over. One leg in front of the other, just don’t stop moving no matter what. The pit of his stomach burned with a fear that he wouldn’t consciously identify.

He wasn’t paying any heed as to where he was going. He was following the sound, senses focused so acutely to his mission that his surroundings were of no consequence or notice to his drug addled brain.

But at a certain point he began to take heed of the change in temperature and atmosphere. He was going lower, he realized. And a cold dampness hung in the air. It only made him break out in a sweat worse than before, feeling fevered in contrast to his surroundings. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand even though the contact of his skin to his senses felt like the sickeningly soft flowing fin of a fish.

She was there, standing still.

It was Prithella Berdock. First year. Slytherin. She had long, blonde, hair and wore spectacles. She loved flowers but hated getting dirt under her nails. She was standing straight as a board, eyes wide open and round saucers staring directly ahead as if entranced- pale with horror.

The dark stone wall had a large, thick, streak of wine red blood defacing it. The blood was thick with the ooze of viscera in it that caused it to stick sickeningly to the wall like a gelatinous mold. In harsh paint strokes of more blood down from the initial mark, the trajectory of the descent was evident.

And on the ground in front of it lay the victim.

It was a truly terrible slight- body akimbo and foot still twitching even with the innards all drawn out in a pulpy mess beside him. The beady eyes staring straight ahead, and the beak still partly open. It was a crow.

Hogwarts was nothing if not drafty and full of secret entrances- it wasn’t irregular for animals to come in and out. In his fourth year, one side of his dormitory room had smelled rotten for days because of a dead mouse stuck in the wall by his bed, before McGonagall had charmed it away with a flick of her wand.

He could imagine what had happened- from the battered look of the poor creature on the floor in front of him, it seemed as if it had panicked at finding itself entrapped and thrown itself fitfully against the walls until finally smashing too hard. It would account for the messy slur of blood stains and scratch marks that speckled the hallway now. Stuck to the blood, between the cracks of the stone were tufts of dark feathers.

Prithella made a noise beside him and he remembered her prescence once more, sitting on his haunches to be at her eye level.

 _It’s okay_ , he thought to tell her.

“I didn’t do it, professor, I swear.” Prithella whimpered, lip trembling.

 _Of course not, its not your fault_. He found he couldn’t speak. His tongue was forked, thin, it slipped uselessly around his overly large, cavernous mouth, flicking against his incisors behind his lips.

“Mmn.” he managed to intone, nodding his head once though it wobbled a little too hard to be normal.

His eyes couldn’t keep focus on Prithella’s face. Everything went through filters of colors and heat with every blink and he couldn’t **_stop_** blinking with his eyelids so dry and heavy.

It was so cold. He’d been noticing for some time but it really was. How was she not freezing? How was their breath not coming out in puffs of smoke before their faces? How was the fresh corpse of the bird next to them not steaming? All that warm blood. Neville felt quite nauseous.

“Rnngh… mm…” he clamped down his jaw, dreadfully afraid of what type of creatures might spill out if he dared open his lips.

“Professor? Professor, are you sick?” her hand touched his shoulder. “You’re shaking.”

And indeed he was. It was just so cold to him.

He felt harsh goosebumps rising on his skin, peaking until they were sharp and he felt like a cactus.

The effects of the drug were wearing off, he could feel that. But it wasn’t leaving his system without a fight.

He was more in control of his body but at the price of being too acutely aware of it. Before, he’d been fine tuned to the unreality of it imagined into being by the effects of the drug, but what was left as the drug wore off was an acute awareness of his body in reality and an exaggerated consciousness of the cold, the sweat on the back of his neck and beading on his forehead, of the dull ache in the front of his skull.

He curled his arms around himself, rubbing his hands up and down his back and forearms to try and spark some warmth.

Prithella’s hand rested on his knee. It was so small and white.

“Professor? Professor?”

The words seemed to echo back and forth across the hallway several times before they reached Neville’s awareness. His vision was fading, blurring everything into mosaic shapes.

“Please say something” Prithella was shaking him, gently, tugging with small fingers on the sleeve of his sweater. And all Neville could do was curl further into the fetal position. He was sure his chest would burst and all the spiders he could feel crawling around inside it would come out like a hurricane of tiny feet.

“Mmgg’ohkay” he managed between tightly pursed lips. GO! he wanted to scream. He was terrified that he would endanger her. Not but a few minutes ago, he had been sure he was a beast. A dangerous one at that. He’d never wanted to be seen in the fits of one of his fantasy trips. It was too much to mix the world of things he controlled and things he couldn’t together in such a way. The effects, as he was feeling, were devastating.

He was tipping to the side, the weight of his shoulders dragging him down like a gravitational pull. He had to struggle just to keep from laying down.

and then “Professor!” this time it was said in a different tone of voice. Surprise? Relief?

Neville craned his neck with great effort to shakily look up though the action made his eyes water.

The face was rippling like a disturbed pond behind the vision of his waterlogged eyes but the essential features remained the same- the gaunt, sallow face, haloed in hair as dark and slippery as seaweed, his black robes billowing like curtains.

Whatever beastly thing had been possessing his body before, stretching its limbs nearly to the point of rupturing out of his flesh, whatever lingering of it was left in him, retreated all at once with sudden force to the muscles of his chest and writhed and shook like an animal caged.

Prithella ran to the older man’s side- small, snow white hands clutching at his dark robes.

“Sir, there was a bird but it was flying around all mad like and then it just went headlong into the wall! I didn’t do anything to it! It was just mad like that!”

Snape’s eyes turned slowly across the scene without moving another muscle, but his eyes never lighted on Neville, still crouched on the floor curled nearly in the fetal position.

“And then- and then Professor Longbottom’s gone all mad now too!”

 _I’m not going mad_ , Neville thought uselessly.

Snape strode over to the wall and waved his wand in a graceful arc. “Scourgify.” The blood stains and clumps of feathers faded from the walls.

He cocked his head slightly, to stare down at Neville, his brows knit together, but his lips- undeniably there was a curl in them. The corner of his mouth was curled up in disgust. His black eyes were searching over him with a curiosity that was uncharacteristic. But the moment passed and he returned to levelling him a gaze of complete indifference.

He spoke slowly and purposefully, as always, to effectively make sure each word was sufficiently saturated with venom.

“I’ve attended to the dead bird now, Mr.Longbottom, so unless you would like to continue amusing us with this repugnant display you can get up off the floor now.”

He turned on his heel, gently nudging Prithella’s shoulder with his fingertips to urge her to follow him, and the two of them left Neville behind, sitting quite still until he heard a door slam distantly.

It took Neville a few minutes to rouse himself to his feet as his body seemed numb from shock, made of lead. But when he regained his energy he broke into a sprint, taking steps two at a time, nearly stumbling over his own feet in his haste until he’d reached his bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.

His breath came in great heaves that nearly made him wretch and he shut his eyes tightly, pressing the back of his head against the door and his palms flat against it for support.

He had been discovered for the first time, and at a point of great vulnerability. It was quite a blow. The experience had put in him a feeling of terror of the likes he hadn’t experienced since he was a child. It was the kind that combined fear and shame- the sense of knowing you’ve done something taboo and anxiously awaiting the impending punishment.

Neville inhaled deeply, in an attempt to calm himself, and tasted salt bitter on his tongue. He touched his fingertips to his face and they came back wet and bright red. There was blood streaming down his nose, catching between his lips and dripping from his chin.


	2. Seeds & The Sea

The combination of the hangover from the Csinpine powder and the shock of being discovered by professor Snape had left Neville nearly bedridden for several days. This was fine as he had no students to look after and with not even the normalcy of meals in the great hall, his absence was completely unnoticed.

 

He spent his time mostly sleeping, sometimes pacing around his room, examining the plants there, and drinking herbal tea.

 

His time was also punctuataed by frequent nosebleeds now which he could only hope were an annoying side effect that would pass eventually.

 

He still quite acutely felt the reverberations of shock from his encounter with Snape. It would come up in his thoughts and make him feel ill with worry and grief. The memory was like a small, restless creature with sharp claws and tiny teeth who had nestled itself deep within his ribcage and regularly wreaked havoc on the surrounding muscles and tissues there.

 

Neville had always been careful to keep his hobby a secret, even from friends. It wasn’t that he felt it was unbecoming, it was that he worried that others would find it unbecoming.

 

More than that, though, there was a sanctuary in the privacy with which he kept this secret life of his.

 

He felt that in using the substances he had become a more pure and lucid form of his Self and that if seen by others, that form would lose power and become diluted and tainted.

 

He’d been proud of his competence in keeping himself private, especially since becoming a teacher. Unlike some of his friends, Neville didn’t naturally revel in unnecessary rule breaking and he’d never considered himself a person capable of guile.

 

And yet, he’d managed it. And enjoyed it. Enjoyed that even if he was seen as witless and incompetent, that he had his share of secrets that no one had discovered or even guessed at.

 

To be robbed of that achievement was quite hard to handle.

 

There was a betrayal of the self- the thought that he had never really managed to be that person and had somehow tricked himself into believing he was. He was being ripped asunder from that fantasy self he’d been cultivating over the course of many years.

 

The other disturbing fact was that the one who’d found him out had been Severus Snape.

 

He wouldn’t say he exactly hated or disliked Snape. It was just that if given the choice he would have preferred to have never had to look at him ever again after graduating Hogwarts.

 

And for good reason- he’d been a menace to him all throughout his time as a student and he’d really only either become more numb or more resilient in the face of him as he’d gotten older. He’d learned to tactfully ignore Snape’s bullying the way he’d learned to ignore every other bully in his life and dismissed him as a necessary evil which he just had to endure but not fear.

 

But like all childhood phobias, the fear would return at strange moments, lingering like a memento for a moment before fading back into obscurity. Like when one suddenly finds themselves in a completely dark room and for a moment feels a great fright before remembering that they’d abandoned their fear of the dark years and years ago. That exact feeling- the momentary fright- would arise sometimes, when he passed Snape in the hallways or accidentally made eye contact with him during meals.

 

It was especially strange as Neville was a proffessor and therefore had to see Snape in very different contexts than he was used to. And always, when he walked through the halls in professor’s robes instead of his uniform or had tea in one of the teachers’ lounges, he felt as if he were trespassing and that Snape would surely call him out for it.

 

Which wasn’t very far from what actually happened on a near daily basis. Snape never missed an opportunity to belittle Neville or draw attention to the fact that he was highly unqualified to be a teacher. The very way he said “professor” before “Longbottom” oozed with a unique type of smug malice he seemed to have reserved for him alone.

 

He was fairly concerned that Snape would rat him out to someone. But the problem was there were few people to tell. Most of the proffessors were away. And the ones who had stayed were doing the same as Neville, mostly holing up in their private studies and living quarters or spending the day in Hogsmeade and coming back late at night.

 

Snape loved to be petty but he also was a highly antisocial person. Neville had noticed this since becoming a proffessor. As a student, one doesn’t think much of their teachers lives outside of their proffession. But having to spend time at teachers meals, faculty-wide events and meetings, and in the teachers’ common areas, Neville had come to realize that Snape was truly one of the most avoidant, withdrawn and misanthropic people he’d ever come across in his life.

 

He’d never seen him smile at another person, he couldn’t even imagine him waving hello. Most days he seemed determined to avoid even making eye contact with other proffessors and any comments or conversation made was almost exclusively snide or gossiping.

 

As horrifying a realization as it was, Snape was actually more social and talkative when teaching classes to students than he was among his actual peers.

 

It wasn’t that Neville had ever presumed to imagine in his highschool years that Snape had had some active social life outside of being a teacher. But he’d never fully grasped that Snape lived in a huge castle in which he really had no friends to speak of.

 

He’d also never fully grasped just how young Snape was. And how odd it was for his life to be so barren. When he’d started teaching, he wouldn’t have been much older than Neville. _Dreary prospects_ , Neville thought to himself vaguely.

 

So there was a chance that Neville’s… outburst… wouldn’t come to light. Or at least not until after the winter holidays. If he had to make an effort to find people and strike up a conversation with them, Neville doubted Snape would tell anyone what he’d witnessed. It would be too much trouble.

 

Once the students and teachers came back, that was a different story. He was quite sure that then Snape wouldn’t miss any chance to bring it up- first in subtle hints that only Neville would understand, and then in more prominent reference that would arouse the curiosity of other teachers, until finally revealing Neville as a sham, or possibly a lunatic.

 

Neville leaned his head back against the wall of his bedroom and bit down on his thumbnail. It tasted vaguely of dirt.

 

He was in real trouble.

 

Unless he could somehow say that he’d just been sick- had a bad case of the flu which had made him collapse on the ground, unable to speak, covered in sweat. It was believable and it might even be what Snape had thought he’d seen.

 

But it didn’t chase the dread from him.

 

Even if he didn’t face repercussions and even if Snape thought he’d seen Neville sick with the flu, what upset Neville most of all was being seen by Snape in the nakedness of his mind bared that way.

 

The magical herbs, the fungi, the smoke, the powders, they all bared his soul and mind in different ways. And that had been his joy in taking them.

 

But now Snape had glimpsed it and all at once the whole thing felt dirty and shameful.

 

Neville raked his fingers through his hair and stood up, pacing restlessly as he’d been doing the past days on and off. He stopped in front of his mirror and examined himself in the glass.

 

 _You don’t look like someone capable of having an immense personal collection of illegal magical substances in your possession_.

 

He supposed that should be a good thing- help avoid suspicion. Really it made him feel a bit gloomy.

 

He’d outgrown some of his pubescent awkwardness when he’d turned twenty, shed some baby fat, and what remained wasn’t an altogether unattractive young man. He was still a bit more soft than say, a quidditch player, or one of the beanpole Weasleys, but he’d grown taller instead of wider at around 17 and evened out his proportions.

 

His face too, was not as round as it had once been and his features weren’t bad to look at- though a bit more ‘pretty’ than masculine… his eyelashes were a bit long, his lips a little too full, and he’d never been able to grow out facial hair. He had wide, sincere, blue eyes that looked back at him.

 

He didn’t feel sincere. Though, he supposed he wasn’t sure what ‘sincere’ or ‘innocent’ felt like exactly. He might’ve looked it, but he was quite certain he’d never **_felt_** ‘innocent’.

 

None of it quite seemed ‘himself’. Especially after smoking something bizzarre he had to check quite often to remind himself that the inner consciousness that defined him was still connected to this slightly alien body.

 

He was overtaken sometimes by a desire to change his appearance in some drastic way- cut off all his hair or find some enchantment that would let him grow a beard, or start wearing glasses. Just to see if he could better connect to the person staring back through the reflection.

 

But he never did. In fear that the unfamiliarity would disconnect him even more.

 

As he was staring at his reflection his toad jumped from a nearby shelf, landing on his shoulder and startling him so badly that he tripped over his own dirty laundry at his feet and fell into a set of flower pots full of leafy plants.

 

\- - -

 

The weather grew cold and on the second week it snowed. When Neville trudged to Hogsmeade to visit Dogweed and Deathcap, there were small huddles of people singing Christmas carols and enchanted candles hanging outside a few of the shops.

 

There was something a bit pitiful about it though. Some of the shops had been closed up completely, windows boarded over and doors wrapped full around with chains and padlocks. Instead of every building being lit up with lights, it was more like every _other_ building.

 

Honeydukes had closed down and the absence was felt acutely- most years the streets were full of people holding gingerbread wizards and self-tying ribbon candy. The smell of molasses, peppermint and sugar plums would fill the streets.

 

Now the shop windows were dark and a sign on the door read “closed for the season” and then, as if thinking better of it, ‘season’ had been crossed out and replaced with ‘indefinitely’. Closed for the indefinitely.

 

The pubs had stayed open but even they seemed less rowdy than usual. When Neville walked by he could see through the windows wizards huddled together in clumps, looking over their shoulders suspiciously before returning to their whispered conversations.

 

Even with holly lining the door and window frames and all the evergreens decorated with lights and baubles, it felt a bit like a farce to Neville. People were scared. They weren’t jolly and full of good cheer. And most of them, even if they put up decorations, weren’t even pretending to be. Even the carolers looked weary.

 

Neville pulled his scarf up higher on his face so it covered his nose. The air was bitterly cold and the snow was that particular type of wet slush that had already drenched his shoes and soaked his socks.

 

By the time he arrived at Dogweed and Deathcap, he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes. The inside of the shop was sweet relief. To keep the plants happy, the entire store was warmed to the point of a tropical, muggy, heat that quickly made Neville’s freezing face tingle pleasantly.

 

The shop was even more crowded with flora than Neville’s bedroom- one had to step carefully to avoid smushing something or knocking over another.

 

The layout was also haphazard, there were glass display cases put up seemingly without any real order in different places throughout the room, curtained off corners provided darkness for night plants, cages and trestles with ivy wrapping around them, pots and vases, all fighting for space.

 

As he walked down the (often winding) aisles of the shop, a vine wrapped around his ankle which he kicked off casually.

 

A carnivorous plant on his left twitched at his movement before opening its brightly colored mouth with a creaking noise, revealing four rows of disturbingly animal looking teeth.

 

Neville didn’t have anything in particular in mind that he needed but he could always find things to pick up, supplies for maintaining his current plants and new plants that he could make room for.

 

Despite the many poisonous and flesh eating plants, the shop had a peaceful atmosphere. There was the smell of flowers in the thick, damp, air and the sound of self watering enchantments could be heard as a faint, melodic, trickle.

 

He kneeled down to observe a glass tank with several small, potted, plants inside that resembled cacti. The label on the tank said “Indonesian Guard Cactus: tap glass for demonstration”.

 

Wincing in anticipation but still curious, Neville wrapped on the glass once lightly with his knuckles. Immediately the cacti twitched and then erupted, sending needles out from all sides. Thankfully the glass of the tank was made of strong stuff and they simply pinged ineffectively off the walls and ceiling of it.

 

He supposed that could come in handy at some point, but at the moment he wasn’t willing to spend his pocket money on it. _Pocket money_ … he still thought of it that way. Even though he was a working adult who had a salary. However meager that salary may be.

 

Neville was examining a large orchid whose sepel had a pattern resembling a woman’s face on it when the door to the shop opened.

 

He elevated himself onto the tips of his toes so his eyes were just peeking between the foliage of a large, flowering, plant, his nose brushing against the tip of the pot and landing in some of the soil. Then immediately ducked down, shrinking himself by sitting on the floor, with his knees curled to his chest.

 

Impossibly, it was Snape who had entered.

 

All manner of swear words burst in Neville’s head before he could have a coherent thought. He’d managed to never cross paths with Snape in Hogsmeade and he’d preferred for it to have stayed that way. There was no doubt that he had to hide, and possibly make attempts to escape.

 

He crawled on the floor, careful to keep his head low and hid inside a curtained tent set up in the middle of the room for nocturnal plants. The space was dark but not pitch black.

 

Two glowing, white flowers, stood on a table in the center of it and the curtains, a dark purple, let in some light through the fabric that cast everything beneath it in shades of violet.

 

Neville crawled to the other end of the tent where the curtains opened and peeked his head out at the bottom, still staying on his knees, scarf trailing on the floor.

 

He could hear the shopkeeper talking to Snape. He could hear Snape- voice unmistakably low and velvet especially in contrast to the shopkeeper’s reedy, high pitched tones.

 

 _What’s he doing here anyway? What does **he** need exotic plants for during the winter holidays?_ He wasn’t aimlessly window shopping the way Neville was.

 

In fact, he seemed to be reading off a list he’d brought with him. Neville chewed his lip for a moment and then made a decision to try and get closer.

 

Neville wasn’t naturally agile so it came as quite a feat.

 

Even trying to get out from under the curtain he was hiding beneath required careful patience so as not to disturb the tent too much and call attention to his location.

 

He ended up inching out very slowly, pulling himself forward on his stomach until his whole body was free. He got to his feet but stayed crouched as he inched closer, moving until he was behind a shelf of poisonous succulents.

 

Peering through the glass bowls he could see Snape’s form, distorted though it was, moving slowly through the aisle, picking things up and inspecting them as he went.

 

Neville could feel annoyance building up irrationally in his chest- once again it felt as though Snape was invading his space. Rummaging thoughtlessly into his comfort zone and touching things he wasn’t even meant to see.

 

Neville followed him throughout the shop, but always at a safe enough distance that he wouldn’t be caught and never close enough that he could actually make out what he was purchasing though he strained to see and sometimes performed impressive acrobatic feats to peer around to him without giving away his position.

 

He got quite close at one point, on his hands and knees behind a large, crowded shelf of plants with Snape on the other side of it. He could see Snape only through looking up through the glass tanks on the bottom shelf and hoping Snape wouldn’t in turn look down and spot him.

 

What did Snape look like when he didn’t know he was being observed? Much the same, really. Somewhat brooding and perpetually with an expression of vague annoyance.

 

He was reading the label on a package of seeds with great concentration, eyebrows set together and the pale, wide, gash of his mouth twisting ever so slightly in an unpleasant, slithering way as his black eyes scanned over the words.

 

He had a black scarf wrapped around his neck that had thick pieces of wet snow stuck to its threads and he was bundled tightly in a thick, black, winter cloak.

 

Neville vaguely wondered how he could stand to stay buttoned up so tightly in the warmth of the shop. He’d unbuttoned his own jacket but he still felt perspiration collecting at the nape of his neck and a flush in his cheeks.

 

Neville still couldn’t make out what he was buying or what was on that list he was carrying. He paused for a moment to question why he cared. Surely he didn’t, after all? There was no reason besides morbid curiosity.

 

Though it was true that Snape had more than once in the past years been implicated as trouble not just as a bad teacher and generally awful human being but as a real threat, or at least was seen as such by Harry and his friends. It had always been of some comfort to Neville that perhaps his fear of Snape was in some way justified on a more universal level. He could very well be up to something. Though, he reasoned, there was nothing particularly suspicious about shopping in Hogsmeade. Aside from the fact that he’d never witnessed him do it before.

 

Snape began to make his way to the front of the store again and desperation took hold.

 

He was paying for his items and Neville would never, ever, for the rest of his life, know what they were. He stumbled forward, still trying to maintain some semblance of stealth and skidded to a halt behind a large, broad leaf palm that kept him mostly concealed.

 

But it wasn’t enough.

 

The shop keeper was handing Snape his change.

 

She was putting his items in a brown paper bag and Neville still couldn’t read the labels on them.

 

He moved forward but the sneaking vine that had tried to trap his ankle earlier had once again managed to wrap around him and as he jerked forward he stumbled, clattering to the side, knocking over a display of seed packets and landing face down on the floor at Snape’s feet.

 

With horror he forced himself to look up into Snape’s face, towering over him, twisted with anger. His lips seemed pale and tightly clenched as his expression evened into one of calm condescension as he stared down at him with half lidded eyes.

 

“ _Longbottom_ ” he sneered, his voice withering, “I hadn’t thought your performance from the last time we saw eachother warranted a sequel.” he enunciated every word with careful venom.

 

Neville clambered to his feet, hastily picking up the things he’d knocked over in his fall. His face was hot- he was sure he was red all the way to his ears.

 

“Nearly all of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts abandoned and you still manage to be under foot and in my way. Nearly impressive. It seems we’ve finally found an endeavour that you have a semblance of competence at.” he carried on in a clipped tone, gathering his parcel and taking his change from the shopkeeper.

 

“Well I try my best.” Neville muttered through clenched teeth. His hands were so forcefully shoved into the pockets of his coat, his fingernails were threatening to break through the cloth lining.

 

Neville couldn’t help but notice that the bag with his purchases was brown paper and rolled over at the top- he’d never see what he’d bought. _Damn_.

 

Somehow even with the embarassment he’d caused in the arbitrary task, it still seemed of great importance to know. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of it.

 

But when he did for a moment force his attention back to Snape’s face, he realized he was being fixed with a stare. Again, there almost seemed to be a curiosity in Snape’s eyes that was foreign to Neville. Curiosity mixed with annoyance, to be sure, but curiosity none the less.

 

“Tell me… why are you still here?” he finally asked. Those dark eyes locked with his, searching.

 

“I shop here all the time.” Neville answered weakly, knowing he was making a stupidly confused expression.

 

Snape made a small noise of disgust, his lip curling up. He broke the eye contact.

 

“I meant why are you still at Hogwarts over the winter recess” Snape spoke slowly, drawing out each word as if he was talking to a particularly stupid child.

 

“Oh.” Neville’s face felt warm again. Talking with Snape he felt transported back to the classroom, being called on suddenly when he didn’t have an answer.

 

“Potter” he hissed “and his troupe, have gone gallavanting off on some sort of fool’s errand, I’m sure.” he paused. “But they’ve left you behind.”

 

The last words were soft and seemed to linger in the muggy air between them.

 

Once again he didn’t know the answer. Not that he hadn’t thought about it. It had been ages since he’d seen or heard from Harry or Hermione or Ron or even Luna. They were doing something terribly brave and secret, possibly together or possibly separate. But without Neville. Neville instead was left alone in Hogwarts, teaching terrified children (who were not ignorant of the war happening outside their school room) how to re-pot baby Mandrakes.

 

“I don’t know.” he finally admitted.

 

Snape stared at him in the same manner he had before for several long moments.

 

“Then I suppose you’d do well to spend your time here more wisely.” he said softly.

 

And then, as inexplicably as he’d walked through the door, he walked out of it, the window blowing his robes behind him like a curl of smoke and he disappeared into the night.

 

The heat in Neville’s face didn’t pass. He stood standing awkwardly at the front of the store for several moments, very aware of the cold wetness in his snow soaked socks and the sweat pooling between his shoulder blades.

 

He picked up the remaining seed packets he’d knocked to the floor and placed them back with unnecessary care and delicacy, waiting for the shaken feeling to leave his body.

 

Finally when he thought it was safe that he wouldn’t cross paths with Snape again, he ventured out into the cold again.

 

The dusk had set into night while he’d been inside and once again it was snowing- wide, wet, flakes that clung to his hair and the shoulders of his cloak.

 

To his own disappointment he felt dejected and he knew it was because of his encounter with Snape. He didn’t like to think of himself as having an ego so fragile but something about that nonsensical and awkward conversation had hollowed out the pit of his stomach in a way even the usual taunts didn’t seem to effect him.

 

He supposed he was already in bad spirits. The fact of the matter was that Snape was the only person he’d spoken to in days and surely that couldn’t be good for the heart- not even just for Neville specifically but for anyone. He thought he might rather have had no company at all over the winter holiday than to have to endure the prescence of Snape always skulking around and regarding him like a village’s missing idiot.

 

And what had he meant by telling him to use his time wisely? Some sort of vague threat? Or caring, professorial advice? In Snape’s case, the first was more likely. It had sounded to his ears like a reprimand but it didn’t carry half the usual scorn that Snape’s criticisms of him usually had.

 

When he approached the castle he was still contemplating the conversation when he felt aware of how dismal Hogwarts looked. In past years, coming back to the castle in winter evenings the snow outside would be aglow with squares of light shining down from each lit up window. When he looked up, none of the windows facing him were lit at all.

 

It looked like an abandoned, haunted, place. And he was a ghost returning to wander it.

 

\- - -

 

The first thing he became aware of was the sound of water roiling and crashing in thick waves. The sea that stretched out before him seemed endless and so black- like it was made of ink.

 

He was barefoot and his toes were buried in wet sand. He inhaled deeply, breath rattling through his ribcage like a gust of wind into an empty house. The edge of the black tide was licking at his ankles before retreating back.

 

Neville regarded the storm looming ahead, moving at an alarming rate. Heavy, dark, clouds churning in their approach from the horizon over the slate grey sky.

 

The waves were leaping now, as if the surface of the ocean was magnetized to the storm clouds above, jumping to try to meet them.

 

Wind was leaving the pattern of ripples over the sea and it whipped at Neville’s hair, blowing it away from his face and nearly bowling him over. He kept his feet firmly planted in the sand even as it howled in his ears, louder even than the crescendo of the water.

 

As he watched motionless, the water began to curl in on itself until there was an eddy forming.

 

Something was rising from it, slowly bubbling up from the center.

 

It looked like a mass of dark weeds, tangled into a grotesque form that began to move on its own, in a sickeningly slow and awkward gait through the water. Tendrils of seaweed like arms pulling itself across the surface heavily.

 

When it finally reached Neville it was taller than him, raised up and he could see the humanoid form underneath the layers of thick algae.

 

It was hard to say where the sea ended and he began, his cloak was the surface of the water, his hair slicked back against his neck as black and sleek as the seaweed.

 

But his face was paler than Neville had ever seen it. Pale as a corpse and streaked with wetness, drops clinging to his long dark eyelashes and the tip of that ugly, curved nose.

 

And his eyes too weren’t black anymore, they were translucent grey like a fish though when Neville attempted to look into them their color and shape seemed to shift, swirling and making him feel light headed until he was forced to avert his gaze.

 

The thing’s mouth began to move, as if he were speaking but the words were drowned out by the noise of the waves and the wind. He strained to listen but the only audible sound was the sea, the weather, drowning everything out until it was just a hum of static in his ears.

 

The tide was coming in, soaking through Neville’s rolled up trousers as it reached his waist in giant gulps.

 

The thing drew closer to him and with stifled horror in his chest he still couldn’t force his muscles to work. He was paralyzed as it raised its slimy arms to wrap around Neville’s shoulders, pulling him down into the water.

 

He finally began to gain control of his body but too late, even as he struggled he was being cocooned by the dark mass, vines of it coiling around his torso and his legs and squeezing tight.

 

The water was on his neck, each wave lapping up to his chin even as he craned his neck to keep from being submerged. The face of the other man was still in front of him, apathetic, but his lips still moved as if in speech. But now Neville was sure that the sound of the wind and the waves was coming straight from the creature’s mouth, whistling out between the rows of his teeth and across his tongue with every calm enunciation.

 

The creature pulled him deeper and Neville gasped, sobbing once as salt water filled his mouth and nose. He thrashed about in the grip but it only made the vice grip around him squeeze more mercilessly.

 

He was dying. His mouth was full of salt. He’d never known water could taste so thick, so heavy, like lead piling up in his aching lungs. He forced his eyes shut and when they opened he was underwater. His clothes were lifting gently around him, his hair floating above his head. Everything felt slow and lazy. But his body was in panic. He needed air. His chest was convulsing with pain, his throat closing in on itself as he gasped uselessly.

 

_I’m dying. I’m dying._

 

His legs felt numb. He’d long since lost feeling in his fingertips. The scope of his vision was going dark even as he still tried to wriggled free of his bondage. He gazed into the water around him, the bubbles and the weeds.

 

 _I’m dying_ …. and then, with more clarity: _I have to wake up_.

 

\- - -

 

Neville jerked awake, his whole body already in a fit of activity, kicking and punching uselessly at the sheets that he’d managed to wrap himself in so tightly as to prevent much movement.

 

There was blood everywhere.

 

He spent several minutes choking and fighting for air as he swiped the back of his arm across his nose and regurgetated the blood that had poured down into his mouth and his throat.

 

It was a flood of red- splattered across his sheets and his white t-shirt, a few droplets had even managed to stain his wall.

 

He was shaking as if he were freezing cold by the time he kicked his sheets off and stumbled into his bathroom. His reflection looked horrific. His eyes were red rimmed and dull. His hair was sticking up in all directions. His skin was pale which only served to contrast the mess of blood that coated the lower half of his face, all the way down his chin and slick across his neck down to the collar of his shirt. His arm was covered in it too, from where he’d tried to wipe it away.

 

 _I hope there isn’t something really wrong with me_ , he thought vaguely and without much concern.

 


	3. Ragweed & Thistle

The initial suspicion of Snape which had planted itself when he’d seen him in Dogweed and Deathcap, over the course of the next 48 hours had rolled into full blown paranoia.

 

And Neville could see, objectively, that it _must_ be paranoia.

 

He was suspicious of Snape because he was treating him in a suspicious manner. He’d spied on him, creeping around and trying to suss out what he was doing in the shop. Snape was surely doing nothing to warrant such behavior from Neville, but nevertheless he’d done it and the act of spying on him had caused Neville’s mind to follow suit, becoming more wary and concerned to lend validity to compensate for the ridiculousness of his actions.

 

Neville knew this but couldn’t shake the feeling that he had reason to be worried.

 

 _It’s just cabin fever_ , he thought. And no wonder. The snow had been coming down steadily. The view outside his window was almost like a desert of fine, white, sand-  built up into massive, unblemished, dunes several feet high and every gust of wind displaced them, filling the air with swirling and glittering white dust.

 

He doubted he’d be making anymore trips to Hogsmeade for at least a few days.

 

Even though the occupants of the castle should have logically been confined there and company should have been more forthcoming, in actuality the place felt more abandoned than ever.

 

Powerful wind howled outside day and night and whipped at every window, shaking them noisily. The sound made Neville feel like he was in a cave- each reverberation of noise in the castle seemed to echo throughout the entire building, the sound bouncing across every stone wall and hallway before it hit his ears.

 

It gave an eerie atmosphere to everything.

 

Neville felt strangely  _obligated_ to wander around the castle but he never saw many people and even when he did, it felt as though they didn’t want to have a conversation and he certainly didn’t either. There was nothing positive to talk about.

 

The people he passed felt more ghostly than human. Everyone seemed to be staring straight ahead. Moving with great certainty but aimlessly- what was there for anyone to do?

 

He thought he’d seen Snape a few times but it was only ever in blurs, shadows. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he recalled seeing him or if he’d only dreamt it. He seemed to exist exclusively out of the corner of his eye, in his periphery, darting behind corners and curtains before he had a chance to turn his head.

 

He wandered into the Gryffindor common room one day and found it to be empty. The room had always had a warm glow to it but that had since been extinguished. There was no fire in the hearth and the room was cast in a pale glow from the colorless sky outside the windows, nothing to occupy it but long shadows from furniture that had never before looked so uninviting to Neville.

 

For his own benefit he’d built a fire and spent an hour or so sitting cross legged in front of it, staring absently into the flames without any particular thoughts or fantasies in mind. He rubbed his hands together in front of it for his hands seemed to be perpetually cold and stiff since the snow had started.

 

When he felt he’d adequately sated whatever need had drawn him to the common room in the first place, he extinguished the fire with a wave of his wand and left.

 

As he walked back to the greenery he regretted making the fire. The scent of ashes had clung to him, seeping into the knit of his sweater. He didn’t like the smell of fire- he liked very few of the scents associated with winter. Winter was barren loneliness, if he closed his eyes and breathed in the ashes, or cinnamon and pine cones, it only seemed to remind him of times he spent solitary and wistful and just a little too cold for comfort.

 

Even the air of the season tasted bad to him- watered down somehow, like the last mouthful of a drink that had too much ice in it. He longed for the perfumed humidity of spring- when the flowers were in bloom and the students seemed even louder than usual as if shouting to scare away the memory of snow.

 

His greenhouse was at least a comfort and when he returned to it he pulled his sweater off and shook his hand through his hair, willing the dust of winter off him. He didn’t care if it was whimsical- he wanted to smell like flowers and earth and the dew at the bottom of a fresh cut stem.

 

When he’d watered everything that needed to be watered he found himself again standing with his hands in his pockets alone and with nothing to do.

 

He wondered that in highschool he’d so relished the brief reprieves he had where he could lie in bed reading whatever he wanted or go to Hogsmeade with no care of a looming assignment over his head.

 

But as an adult he found there was something almost uncivilized about having too much free time. He looked at the stack of books on the table that he’d taken from the library with a weary reluctance.

 

It felt like being a prisoner. Solitary confinement in the highest tower of a winter castle with only tea and toast and a few books to sustain his boredom.

 

He slumped in his chair, making a show for no one of pressing his face against his hand and flipping the first book open to a random page with reckless disinterest.

 

Neville dutifully read a few pages before becoming distracted by a moving picture of the process of a flower’s pollination. He twirled a lock of his hair around his finger, pulling it taut.

 

The nosebleeds hadn’t gone away. He woke up with them most mornings and frequently they would come on at random throughout the day.

 

Somehow he didn’t feel moved to care about them. It seemed one of many unruly aspects of his body that he had no choice but to disengage from. For as long as he could remember, Neville had had a vacant disregard for the body like a vehicle that had never really been in his control.

 

He’d suspected for some time that his own clumsiness was partially symptomatic of this aspect of his psychology. Sometimes it felt like he was so removed from himself that he was barely aware of his body relative to the environment around it, nearly loose limbed in his abandonment of it.

 

And yet so clumsy because despite that, he still had an irrepressible urge to touch things, breathe them in, taste them, experience their texture. So he sent his uncoordinated shell head first out to take in the world even if it meant tripping over his own feet.

 

But the nosebleeds- he could taste the blood on his lips, salt, and feel the wetness stain his fingertips like warm drops of ink, but it didn’t feel like _**his**_ blood, _**his**_ body. His mind rebelled at the very idea of acknowledging them. He had enough concerns without adopting this new one.

 

 _Though, what else do I have to think about?_ the curl of hair he'd been keeping wound around his finger unfurled. He realized, with some horror, that what he was was _**bored**_. And it made him feel ill. 

 

That he could be bored when every other wizard in England was fearing for their lives, with his friends on the run, the whole country in chaos. But he was. He didn't know how to spend his time, he didn't know what he could do to give himself purpose. But ultimately, he was sure he didn't have the competence to help anyway. 

 

 _Don't let me be bored_ , he thought to himself sleepily, almost like a prayer. _I could bear to be frightened or crying or angry, just please don't let me be bored. I couldn't stand the shame._

 

No, the shame would be manageable. But the displacement might not be. And what Neville felt, equal to his boredom and partner to it, was displacement. He'd never belonged, there had even been many times in his life when he could've considered himself 'neglected' but even in those times his loneliness had never gone uninterrupted even if the interruptions were not entirely pleasant. 

 

He feared being left alone with his own mind. He feared being left with his boredom and his mind and spinning further down into his solitude, his own imagination, while the world outside him grew into a tempest of weeds, strangling his roots out. Overrunning everything. 

 

 _Don't let me be bored and alone_ , his dazed mind whispered. 

 

His eyelids drooped as he watched the loop of the pollination diagram. The bee’s tiny black legs lighted on the flower petal as his eyelashes sank against his cheek and he succumbed to the heavy weight of sleep.

 

In his dreams he wore a suit of knight’s armor though it was far too big for him. Heavy, and engulfing him entirely like a carapace.

 

It was black darkness inside save for two narrow slits in the helmet where light came in and he could see a thin sliver of the world outside. He could barely make out what was out there and could hear nothing but his own heavy breathing echoing through the metal cave he was trapped in.

 

But he could smell ragweed and thistle, warm and familiar in his nostrils.

 

Neville blinked several times, knowing that this was a dream vaguely. A dream where he was a knight, perhaps recruited out of desperation for a doomed war, for an army that had already been decimated several times over.

 

He made a weak attempt to move his body forward but the armour was making him stiff, metal plates of it grinded together with an awful noise with every twitch of his arms or legs.

 

It took all his strength just to lift his arm and take notice that he was holding a broad sword. Somehow it didn’t feel heavy- not even as heavy as the armour on his shoulders, which seemed to weigh him down, while the sword held blade upward almost felt like it was lifting him up.

 

A shadow darted across the narrow strip of light he could see out of his helmet. An enemy. Something was out there. He squinted but all he could see was that there was some light outside the darkness of his armor, he could distinguish no other features of the landscape.

 

Neville tried again to take a step forward, hearing his breath pick up. His hand clenched into a fist with some effort inside the gauntlet, clutching the sword.

 

He held his breath and he waited for his opponent to make the first move.

 

Then the shadow that had flitted by was suddenly much closer, and it spread itself like wings in front of the eyeholes of his helmet until it had blocked out all the light.

 

With a rush, something entered through the slits in the helmet. A storm of some tiny, living, winged, creatures flooded into his armour through the slats. The cavernous chest piece first began to fill with them, pouring in as easily as a liquid but each tiny thing furious chaos beating their wings violently.

 

Soon the chest piece was filled and they spread, taking up every available space in the metal pieces covering his arms, his legs, overfilling his helmet, seemingly endless numbers of them.

 

They scratched at his face with tiny claws, he had to shut his eyes, barely breathe, lips sealed tight. His whole body was encased with crawling insects.

 

The amount of them was heavy, with a creak he began to tip backwards, dragged by his heavy casing. He was falling, floating, in pitch blackness, the fluttering of small wings on his skin the only thing connecting him to any type of sensation, keeping him from imagining he was falling down through space an endless tunnel-

 

The gusts of wind and snow battered the green house like waves in a storm and Neville flung his head back, gasping awake just as one of the windows finally gave out under the pressure, crashing open and letting in the howl of the wind and spraying his face with ice.

 

Papers flew about the room and some of his plants visibly wilted, curling in on themselves to brace against the flush of cold air.

 

Neville rushed forward, hair whipping back from his forehead and slammed the window shut with all his strength.

 

He turned, out of breath, to see how much damage was done. He went around quickly, re-casting warming charms on his plants, murmuring soothingly to them every so often under his breath as if to comfort them.

 

When he finished he began collecting up the papers that had fallen to the floor when he noticed a book on the table which had been blown open.

It was Dizzeria Potspeck’s “Fantasy Seer’s Guide To Spiritual Herbs and Fungi” and it was open to a page Neville hadn’t read yet.

 

Intrigued, he looked it over.

 

He was used to Dizzeria going on long winding stories in all of her potion and plant descriptions- they usually included a several paragraph long introduction about her own magical experiences taking whatever it was and sometimes a poem about the way it smelled, then finally the recipe to using it at the bottom of the page as if it had been included as an after thought.

 

This page was very different however.

The description simply and succinctly read: “The eyes of the spirit exist outside the body.”

 

His attention was already held by any potion that had apparently left Dizzeria at such an uncharacteristic loss for words.

 

Neville scanned over the ingredients of the potion. This too was different from the more pure herbal mixtures he was used to seeing in Dizzeria’s book.

In fact, this particular potion looked more like it was bordering dangerously on black magic….

 

The first ingredient was dried and crushed atropa belladonna- which Neville had used on occasion before- but never in the amount that this potion called for. Night shade was most common in the dark arts …

 

He ran a hand through his hair. It was still wet with ice from the open window.

 

The base liquid was 3 cups of water taken from a stream or river where water runs slightly East, collected in a sterling chalice.

 

There were two different types of fungi that Neville recognized as being hallucinogenic. Then there was bilberry, crushed with a glass pestle, and euphrasia flower-

the strangest ingredient was a crow’s eye, boiled down into liquid.

 

Most of the potions in Dizzeria’s book were a bit more… _animal friendly_. Using the flesh of a living creature in a potion, even if it didn’t require a sacrificial ritual, gave the spell more power. A dark power.

 

Before Neville had a chance to ponder it further, he was snapped out of his focus by a knock at the door.

 

He jumped to his feet to answer it but paused with his hand outstretched to the knob.

 

It was dark out. And no one had come knocking at his door in at least a week. He’d barely spoken to anyone since the winter holidays had started.

 

Before he’d even begun to fully process it his mind started crowding with hysterical proposals- it was probably someone coming to tell him news about the war. While he’d been asleep, some important development had occurred. Or maybe they had to evacuate the castle.

 

Or… his fingers coiled back from the doorknob into his palm. Or… Snape had told on him. Reported his strange behavior to someone. They could be coming to tell him to leave.

 

Neville held his breath and watched the shadow the person on the other side of the door was making on the floor through the crack in the doorframe.

The shadow moved and he heard the person take a hesitant step back.

 

It was an impulse decision but Neville jumped forward and flung the door open.

 

Before him, wrapped in a wool cloak and looking extremely small, was Prithella Berdock.

 

“Prithella- hullo- uh, what are you-?” Neville stammered, shocked and relieved. “What TIME is it?”

 

“After midnight.” Prithella whispered, biting her lip. “I snuck out.”

 

“What on earth are you doing up?” Neville realized that he was whispering too now, as a response to her whispering. He reminded himself that he was an adult and allowed to be up past his bedtime.

 

Prithella bit her lip again, looking guilty and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. Her luminescent blue eyes darted around nervously behind her spectacles.

 

“I just came because I wanted to make sure you were alright. I’m going home tomorrow and the last time I saw you, you weren’t well.” she admitted, still keeping her voice low.

 

Neville’s throat tightened at the memory- the dead bird, her fear, and himself sweating fire and shaking too hard to speak, completely unable to console her.

 

He forced a smile and stepped sideways to leave room in the doorframe.

 

“Why don’t you come in. I’ll make us cocoa.”

 

\-- -- -- --

 

Prithella nestled into the lumpy couch Neville had in the corner of his office. Ivy crawled up the window behind it and the sill was covered in potted plants, some of which had overgrown until their vines were wrapped around the frame of the furniture itself. Moss was growing on every surface of the office for better or for worse- it blended into the green velvet of the couch.

 

She was staring out the window with a stillness that seemed uncharacteristic for a child. With her wide, nearly spooky eyes she had a Luna Lovegood quality to her. Though the wild mess of her hair and the way she always raised her hand high in the air when she knew the answer in class were very Hermione. And the rounded spectacles- Harry.

Neville saw himself and his friends in every one of his students. He saw it in the way they had to grow up too fast.

 

Neville sat down across from her in an arm chair and placed two mugs of cocoa between them.

 

“Sorry I don’t have any marshmallows,” he apologized sheepishly.

 

Prithella started when he spoke, taking her eyes off the falling snow she’d been watching outside. But she relaxed and beamed at him warmly. 

 

"That's all right, professor." 

 

She picked up the mug and cradled it between her tiny hands.

 

“Careful- it’s hot.” he warned.

 

They sat in a comfortable silence with only the sound of the wind and snow for a few moments.

 

“My parents are coming to pick me up early tomorrow morning. We’re going to Switzerland together.” Prithella said.

 

Her tone was clipped and businesslike. She sounded like she was imitating how her mother spoke. Prithella’s posture was always ramrod straight as well and Neville wondered if that was also something she’d inherited from her mother.

 

“Switzerland? That’s exciting. I suppose you’ll get to try real Swiss cheese.” Neville said, expounding the only pitiful bit of knowledge whatsoever he had of Switzerland.

 

“My parents say theres’s chocolate too.” she said in a delighted whisper. “My father has a cousin there. He says it will be … safer. Than England.”

 

Neville nodded once.

 

“He might be right.” he said quietly, more to himself than her.

 

“It’s strange. I thought school was so safe. Sometimes everything seems so normal here. But then other times… not. Sometimes everything feels wrong too.”

 

Neville couldn’t agree more but he just nodded patiently and let her continue.

 

“The upper classmen are always reading the newspapers. They argue a lot. And then other days people will just disappear- get taken out of school to be homeschooled. Well, I guess I’m one of those people now. One of the disappeared ones. Strange to think of yourself that way.”

 

“And will you be happy? To dissapear? Get away from it all?” Neville realized after he’d said it that it was a rather mature question but Prithella answered quickly.

 

“I’ve been trying to decide. Maybe.” then she perked up, “but I’ll miss working on the greenhouse with you, professor. I reckon there won’t be many flowers in Switzerland with all the snow.”

 

“No, I suppose not.” Neville laughed.

 

“I’m glad you seem better, professor.” she said after a pause, smiling at him again

 

“Yes. Just a bit- sick. That was all.” Neville stammered, scratching the back of his neck self consciously.

 

“Although,” she said and her eyes rolled up to the corner of the ceiling as if she was trying to remember “It was so strange. That poor crow.”

 

Prithella ran the tip of her finger on the rim of her mug. “I remember wondering,” she continued, “If that poor crow belonged to professor Snape. And if it had escaped.”

 

Neville’s eyebrows knit together and he put his mug of cocoa down on the table. He leaned forward, suddenly serious and speaking slowly, sternly- his teacher voice.

 

“What do you mean by that, Prithella? What does the crow have to do with professor Snape?”

 

She shrugged innocently. “Well, in potions class I always sit in the same spot. By the far left wall. And there’s all those shelves with potions ingredients on them. Sometimes I drift off from paying attention to the lesson and I end up looking at all the jars and bottles there. And there’s one right near my head that says ‘crow’s eyes’ on it.”

 

Neville’s blood ran cold. Crow’s eyes. The same as the potion he’d been looking at in Dizzeria’s book. In that moment for the first and not the last time in the weeks that would follow, Neville felt a sense of unnerved wonder at how strangely fate seemed to work.

 

“I remember because they always make me feel scared. All those little eyes,” Prithella shivered, “staring at me.”

 

Neville took a measured sip of his cocoa and tried to affect nonchalance.

“And what has professor Snape been up to recently?”

 

Prithella shrugged again. “He’s the head of my house but I barely see him lately. He stays cooped up in the dungeon even though there aren’t any classes in session. I think he’s been working on something.”

 

“Like what? Do you know what he’s been working on? Has he said anything?” Neville winced after hearing the high note of desperation in his own tone.

 

Prithella looked at him a little warily and took her time sipping her cocoa before answering.

 

“I don’t know what it is. Just that it’s keeping him awfully busy.” she said primly, “I suppose that’s why I was able to sneak out tonight without getting caught.”

 

“Right.” Neville said remembering how late it was. And thinking to himself that Prithella was a great deal braver than he was to sneak out under Snape’s watch. Ambition indeed. Even freshmen Slytherin were a force to be reckoned with. “You should get back before he notices you’re gone. Wouldn’t want to get a last minute detention in your last few hours on campus. Besides, you’ll need your sleep. You’re traveling tomorrow.”

 

Prithella sighed but stood up from the couch. “I know I’ll just toss and turn though.”

 

“Mm. Know the feeling.” Neville muttered under his breath but he got to his feet as well. “Hold on a minute. Before you go-“

 

He jumped over to the table in the corner of his office that was overgrown with plants and began rummaging around.

 

“Ah! Here.” he turned around and placed a small, aerated glass ball in her hand that contained a wispy purple flower.

 

“Oh, it’s lovely.” Prithella breathed.

 

“Tillandsia Medeis. It doesn’t need any soil and it will thrive even in cold weather.” he explained proudly, “A flower to keep you company in the snow.”

 

Prithella looked up at him with wide, illuminated eyes behind her spectacles. “Thank you, professor! I’ll take ever such good care of it.”

 

Neville walked Prithella back to the entrance of her dorm, holding her hand when she grabbed it in the darkness of the hallways lit only by his wand, and whispered a wish of safe travels to her at the door. Then he put a finger to his lips, rolling his eyes in the direction of the door to silently indicate that she stay quiet if she hoped to avoid incurring the wrath of teachers or students who could be about. She nodded, putting a finger to her lips as well conspiratorily before going in. 

 

And as the entrance closed behind her, he turned his head in the direction of the long, dark, hallway that led to Snape’s dungeon and resolved to go there the next day.

 

\-- -- -- -- --

 

Neville awoke to sunlight on his face and red stained across his nose and lips spilling down the pale curve of his neck.

 

The storm had passed. The absence of noise from the wind and snow which he’d become accustomed to over the last few days was almost eerie. Quiet… _**too**_ quiet. Everything was still. The snow on the ground was so thick and unblemished it looked like a blanket of meringue covering as far as he could view from his window. Stretching out over the woods, frosting thick even over the tree tops of the forbidden forest.

 

As he washed the blood off his face in the shower he remembered that Prithella had left that morning. He hoped she’d be alright and he felt a pang in his chest, that another of the ‘flock’ of students still remaining at Hogwarts was gone.

 

He recalled the time when Sirius Black had escaped from prison, and how all the students had slept in the great hall together. Neville had never gone camping with friends before. Seamus Finnegan had accidentally kicked him in the head in his sleep several times. And everyone had been whispering back and forth, telling horror stories essentially- trying to outscare each other. Neville had felt safe. Staring at the enchanted ceiling alight with bright stars and enveloped by the sounds of his peers snoring, whispering, giggling.

 

It seemed the direct opposite of the cold, abandoned, gryffindor common room he’d visited the day before. The war hadn’t brought anyone together. Everyone felt dissonant. There was no silver lining, no camaraderie to be had from the suffering they were experiencing. He felt more desperately alone than ever before.

 

With the water running down his back between his shoulder blades and his eyes closed, he thought he could hear the ocean. If he held his breath he could pretend he was drowning if only for a second.

 

\-- -- -- --

 

Making the journey down through the winding hallways of the castle to Snape’s potions dungeon always felt to Neville a bit like a fairytale: the part where the hero, in the darkness guided only by a torch or his wand light, begins exploring a strange cave. The farther he goes the more it twists and turns, until he reaches a point where he realizes he isn’t in a cave at all and he’s wandered accidentally into the mouth and down the throat of an enormous monster.

 

“Using vacation time to visit the potion’s dungeon. What has my life come to.” Neville muttered to himself between gritted teeth.

 

The halls were silent except for a steady, echoing, sound of water in motion that always could be heard distantly the closer one got to the slytherin dormitory area.

 

The light was dim and Neville’s shadow followed him, a stretched and distorted giant. The way it moved set Neville on edge. He kept darting glances over his shoulder. He half expected the shadow to step from the wall, manifesting as the potion’s master himself. It really wouldn’t take much imagination for a shadow to become Snape- he was already so protean in form and movement, and so dark…

 

Neville stood before the door of Snape’s classroom and realized he’d been holding his breath for the last few steps.

 

Silly, really. It wasn’t like he was taking an exam. _No, just attempting to spy on a professor._

 

He tried to turn the doorknob noiselessly but it creaked heavily as he entered.

 

Empty. The tables lined up neatly, the chalkboard wiped clean.

 

It was stifling somehow. Being there alone. There was so much more space than he’d ever seen but the emptiness filled the room like a physical presence. A classroom crowded with ghosts.

 

He was letting himself get distracted. Snape’s private office was connected to the potion’s classroom and he could see the door was open a crack. The decision had to be made whether to knock or not.

 

He stepped close enough that his ear was almost touching the door. All he could hear was his own breathing echoing back to him. So he held his breath.

 

And strained his ears to detect the sound of Snape’s breathing.

 

Then an irrational fear took hold. He imagined Snape on the other side of the door, poised the same way Neville was, with his ear against the wood separating them, holding his own breath to better hear Neville’s.

 

Maybe he’d heard the door open. Was as anxious as Neville had been the night before when he’d had an unknown visitor come knocking.

 

That thought was terrifying. He closed his eyes and placed his hand on the door. It was cool to the touch of his sweating palm.

 

With his eyes closed his vision was rushed with the fantasy of Snape as his mirror image- his pale hand pressed against the door now too from the other side, and his body tensed.

 

Would he be waiting for bad news the way Neville had? Did Snape have people outside of Hogwarts that he cared about? People he worried for?

 

Neville’s blood felt cold and foreign in his veins at the thought of it but his face felt fever hot.

 

He hoped there was something terrible behind the door instead. Something sinister.

 

Strange to think that Neville could fear the thought of barging in on Snape, anxious and waiting as he had been- as he WAS- with nothing to say, more than he could fear discovering some type of evil workings. But he did. He did.

 

He wrapped his hand around the edge of the door. Quietly released the breath he’d been holding. And he flung the door to the office back.

 

There was a heavy creak but it wasn’t coming from in front of him- it was from behind him.

 

He swept open the door and not an instant later swung his own body around to see Snape standing across the room at the entrance of the classroom.

 

He was staring at Neville who was poised in the doorframe to his private office, the door still caught in the motion of swinging.

 

The look on the professor’s face was one of mute surprise and displeasure but he seemed to compose himself, taking two steps into the classroom while Neville stood stock still.

 

“Have we given up on the courtesy of knocking?” Snape asked softly, his eyes moving slowly between Neville and his open office door.

 

Neville thought about how certain prey animals could die of fear- mice or rabbits- they’d go perfectly still and become paralyzed. They’d just stop breathing or moving. Their bodies would go stiff. He sympathized.

 

“I just” Neville himself looked at the door with a sort of astonishment as if his arm had moved on its own to open it. “It was open a crack and I-“

 

“You thought you would invite yourself in?” Snape finished for him.

 

Neville bit the inside of his cheek. “Of course not.”

 

But he turned his body half to the side and peered into the office from where he was standing.

 

He’d never have willingly gone to Snape’s _lair_ in his student years so the space was unfamiliar to him.

 

It was poorly lit and crowded- the walls were adorned with overly filled shelves and cupboards stacked with jars and bottles practically up to the ceiling.

 

But the desk looked very different from Neville’s. Neville’s desk was fairly messy- empty tea cups, ungraded essays, books left half open, seed packets… Neville’s desk gave off the impression of a storage space.

 

The organization of Snape’s desk was strange. It looked like it was housing a project in progress- there was a mortar and pestle out with something ground in it, there were jars and bottles arranged in what looked to be a specific order, one thick weather beaten book was open with a bookmark still on the page, even a pile of fresh herbs wrapped in a sheath of wax paper was laid out on the table…

 

Neville frowned. “Working on something, professor-?”

 

Snape travelled the distance of the classroom at an unreasonable speed and was at Neville’s side in an instant, slamming the door to his office shut in his face and whirling to face Neville, his back defensively against the door.

 

Neville of course nearly jumped out of his skin but refused to move away. Even with Snape in close enough proximity that he could see the oily pores on his nose.

 

“….working on something _**secret**_...?” Neville corrected himself, speaking quietly and looking into Snape’s impenetrably black eyes.

 

He could practically feel the air between them shift from Snape’s slow inhalation of breath.

 

“Is there any purpose to your visit here today, Longbottom? Other than meddling?”

 

“No.” Neville said automatically then stammered over his answer, “I mean- yes. Well. Actually it was that I-“

 

He took a deep shaking breath and started again as Snape blinked at him with total indifference. “Did you see Prithella Berdock off this morning?” he finally managed. “She told me the other day that her parents were coming to fetch her. Going abroad.”

 

Snape continued to survey him looking unimpressed through glossy, heavy lidded, eyes. He finally took a step away from his office door, crossing his arms over his chest.

 

“And when,” he drawled, “Did she tell you that?” he raised an eyebrow, sneer curling at his mouth. “was it **before**  or **after**  you _swooned_ into a twitching pile on the ground?”

 

Neville blinked and his vision flashed with the blurry image of Prithella and Snape standing over him as the csinpine had wreaked havoc on him.

 

He set his jaw and narrowed his eyes at Snape who was regarding him smugly.

 

“I had the flu.” he said firmly.

 

“And have you _recuperated_?” Snape asked, enunciating every syllable of the last word in a way that bordered on sarcasm.

 

Neville didn’t answer, instead turning on his heel and pacing the edge of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, pretending to look at the ingredients on the shelves with a forced nonchalance.

 

“When I saw you in Hogsmeade the other day I thought maybe you were purchasing something specific.” he turned his head back to Snape to watch for his expression, making sure to keep his own face a picture of wide eyed innocence. “You know, my greenhouse is always open to you if there’s anything you need… help with.”

 

Neville added the last words carefully and was satisfied to see Snape’s upper lip twitch with displeasure.

 

“The list of things you could possibly be qualified to help me with is so short it is infeasible to quantify.” Snape hissed with thinly veiled frustration.

 

Neville turned back around, picking up a bottle off the wall and pretending to examine it.

 

He heard Snape make a stifled sound of annoyance behind him before he asked, “What is it you want, Mr.Longbottom? Or do you think you could possibly waste your time elsewhere? Bother a different professor?”

 

Neville frowned but kept his eyes staring blankly at the wall. He longed to throw back the door to Snape’s office and see what he was doing. It itched in a type of lingering way to be excluded from whatever secrets he was keeping. He felt that Snape was hindering him from a greater purpose of _**helping**_  somehow, finding _**something**_. He wished for something sinister to be at play. For no other reason than to give purpose to his time.

 

His hands clenched in his pockets, down to the marrow of his bones twitching to touch things that didn’t belong to him, to reach out and handle something of great importance, something forbidden. He wanted to swipe his fingertips through whatever was ground in the mortar on Snape’s desk, to run his thumb across the stems of the fresh herbs he had there.

 

“Oh.” Neville said, again working to keep his voice composed light and guileless. “I’m sorry. Are you terribly busy?”

 

Snape glowered at him and crossed the room several steps, his robes always seeming to ripple like a shadow across the floor at his feet behind him.

 

“I’d like to say that I enjoy having your company here immensely-“

 

“Er-“ Neville said.

 

“-but as we both know, that would be a lie.” Snape finished. “I can’t think of any reason why either of us would want to spend any more time in eachother’s presence than is strictly necessary.”

 

Neville was invading Snape’s territory. Of course he was upset. Snape was an even more private person than Neville was. But it seemed only fair. He’d come menacing about into Dogcap and Deathweed and seen Neville at a low point, was it not justified for Neville to retaliate? This was revenge.

 

Snape was looking slightly smug again, the side of his mouth turned upward at one corner. Neville _loathed_ that mouth. Too wide and malleable, curling and twitching, snake-like in its animation.

 

“There’s just so few professors left on campus…” Neville said, speaking softly. The softer he kept his voice, the less likely it would be to crack. He held Snape’s gaze, forcing his eyes from flitting to his lips, locking on to those dark tunnels of pupils even though it made his chest tighten defensively. “… I thought we should all try to keep eachother… out of trouble.”

 

His lips parted around the words gently but the last word fell heavily, sending ripples through the silence between them.

 

Something flickered over Snape’s features for a moment- too quickly to read. Then he narrowed his eyes and advanced on Neville with slow, purposeful, steps. Until they were too close for comfort once more and Neville had to turn his eyes upward to meet Snape’s. He’d grown over the last few years, but he still wasn’t as tall as Snape. He wondered if he ever would be.

 

“If you’re hoping to stay out of trouble…” the older man spoke calmly, his voice low and wrapped in velvet as he leaned even closer- until Neville had to look through his own eyelashes to keep eye contact without tilting his head. “…You’re not doing a very good job so far.”

 

Neville stood stock still, taking deliberate, shallow, breaths through his nose. Half his mind was occupied with hearing what Snape said, another quarter distracted by the way the fabric of Snape’s cloak (which always seemed to float around him as if he was underwater) was in close enough proximity that the edges clung to the frayed static threads that poked out of the knitting on Neville’s sweater, the last quarter of his mind wondering if it was possible to have a fever and ice pouring through one’s veins simultaneously.

 

When Snape spoke again it was barely a whisper but he heard it as if it was an arrow fired directly against his eardrum:

 “Don’t _ever_ try and _threaten_ me again.”

 

Snape pulled his wand from his robe and stretched his arm out to the side, never taking his eyes off Neville for a moment, and with a flick of his wrist the heavy classroom door flew open.

 

“Now get out of my classroom.” he snarled before turning with a sweep of his robes against the floor, opening his own office door and dissappearing behind it with a slam that shook the bottles lined up on the walls.

 

Neville forced himself not to blink, breathed deeply through hise nose, the same way he always did when he could feel hot tears flooding his eyes but didn’t want them to fall.

 

Once the feeling had passed, as it usually did without incident, he felt frustrated more than anything else. Though if it was at himself for how measly his intimidation techniques were or Snape for rejecting them so utterly, he didn’t know.

 

He sniffed once and chewed the inside of his cheek, still standing rooted to the spot where Snape had left him.

 

But then he remembered the crows’ eyes.

 

He stepped carefully, to avoid making noise, eyeing the shelves along the walls. Where had Prithella said she sat in class?

 

It only took a few moments before he spotted the jar, innocuous as it was surrounded by other equally unappetizing bottles of ingredients and pickled flesh.

About the same size of a jar of jam and crowded with small, glossy, eyes staring back at him. He shivered but leaned up on the tips of his toes and took it off the shelf.

 

The glass was cool and heavy against the palm of his hand. He regarded it like a lost treasure he'd unearthed after years of searching. 

 

He glanced toward the closed door to Snape’s office but there was no sound coming from behind it.

 

 _He won’t notice it’s gone_ , Neville thought with a sort of giddy excitement building in his chest, _And even if he does, what can he do about it? He’ll just know that I stole it right out from under his nose._

 

The utter joy of keeping secrets, of doing things counter to expectation, was such a private and personal need that Neville was sure no one else in the world would ever fully understand it. But to steal something from Snape, to take the jar with Snape only a few feet away separated by the door, to take the jar and keep it in his own room, run his hands along it, examine it- 

 

His heartbeat was like butterfly wings, the blood moving his pulse felt warm and his own again. 

 

He kept the jar in his hand, holding it close to his side and walking out the door to the class, feeling more gleefull leaving the potions dungeon than he possibly ever had in his history at Hogwarts.

 

He could deceive Snape successfully. He bit his lip to contain his smile. It wasn’t beyond him, and who would have ever guessed? And soon, he’d know what he was keeping inside his office as well. 


	4. Chapter 4

Neville sucked in his breath, feeling the sagatbloom extract fill every crevice of his lungs with what felt like boiling hot maple syrup. He closed his eyes, burning, burning, until he couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet and the blood rushed to his head. Then he exhaled, burnt sugar clinging to his tongue and teeth.

 

The forbidden forest was still dense with greenery even in the midst of winter. The snow came up to Neville’s knees but the further he walked into the trees, the less snow there was until it gave way to nothing but roots under his feet, lightly coated with frost.

 

Tiny, thin, mushrooms the color of a robin’s egg were blooming in the small mountains of snow that collected every few paces in places where the canopy of leaves hadn’t protected the ground from the weather.

 

The woods rustled and chirped with life and Neville continued at a brisk pace with the silver chalice in his rucksack clanging noisily with each step.

 

When he’d left Snape’s office the day before he’d returned to looking at the mysterious potion in Dizzeria Potspeck’s book which had presented itself to him. The formal name scrawled at the top of the page was the “auroculus” enchantment.

 

Neville had spent the night studying it with more focus than he usually gave to grading papers- much less to writing them when he’d been a student.

The brewing of the potion was not overly complicated, though Neville thought that with the range of ingredients it would still probably be a hassle to make for the average unmotivated fantasy seeker who didn’t have a well stocked greenhouse at his or her disposal.

 

There was no further explanation for the exact effects of the potion in Dizzeria’s book (it was not exactly uncommon for Dizzeria’s entries to be mysterious and vague) but when he turned the page after the instructions, he’d landed upon a strange index.

 

The index was still listed under the header of being connected to the auroculus potion but it resembled to Neville’s eye at least, the charts found in divination text books.

 

It was a guide to the interpretation of symbols- animals and colors and objects in one side of the table and on the other side, their meaning.

 

The charts were wonderful, and they went on for several pages. Neville pored over them, some were just words, others were pictures, presumably hand drawn by Dizzeria.

 

He’d rubbed his thumb over the scribbles, often deeply embedded into the page with the force of her hand.

There was an entire section where the symbols became a complete mystery to Neville- just frantic marks on the page, different forms of squiggled lines or clouds of ink smeared. But next to each was a meaning.

 

One said “return from exile, the warmth of a friend long lost” another, several straight lines cross hatched over another and a shape behind them was “you will shake hands with someone who will lead you further into darkness”.

 

Others were much more straight forward- a crab meant secrets, guardianship. An egg meant new beginnings. Wreaths were signs of happiness, joy.

 

Neville had never been particularly skilled at divination so he hoped the long chart would become self evident later, even if he didn’t understand it at first glance.

 

He hoped that after going to the trouble of trying to brew the potion that it wouldn’t turn out to be something as banal as tea reading.

 

To indulge his own macabre curiosity, Neville had looked up in the index what a raven meant. Listed alphabetically under rat (for perseverance, survival through wits), ravens were oracles, foreshadowing, a warning …

 

Neville had become quite preoccupied with the jar of raven’s eyes. Not the things themselves- which he didn’t even like to look at more than he had to- but rather he was deeply concerned that somehow it would be stolen from him without his notice the same way he’d stolen them from Snape.

 

He’d spent the night with his back against the wall, facing the door. The jar of eyes set neatly on the ground between the door and the tip of his leg stretched out in front of him, like a lure, visible in a shaft of blue moonlight illuminating squares on the ground and the walls.

 

He’d smoked dizzycot leaf, blowing limp purple smoke rings into the air, and imagining Snape on the other side of the door.

 

Imagining Snape twisting his liquid body into a puddle which would ooze underneath the crack below his door only to swirl up like smoke back into his full form.

 

Neville had passed out like that and woken only when his face grew hot with the sunlight beating onto it.

 

Before he’d ventured to the forbidden forest for ingredients, he’d made sure to hide the jar of raven’s eyes away.

 In a chest he kept under his bed with an enchanted lock on it. The chest had a fairly disparate collection of items in it- small, meaningful tokens from home or from his parents (lots of candy wrappers, a few dropped coins, sometimes a plant or pebble from the garden outside St.Mungo’s), then some of his more illegal hallucinogenic substances, and now the stolen raven’s eyes.

 

He thought he should feel strange keeping all those items in one storage place- the tokens from his parents were more valuable to him than the little bottles of unused fantasy potions or herbs and he didn’t even really WANT the jar of raven’s eyes. But it wasn’t really a box of valuables as much as it was a box of secrets.

 

If anyone else saw these things, if anyone else asked about them- he’d have to explain.

And he didn’t think he could.

Even if he found a way to do so, he feared that in minimizing the significance down to words he’d have marred his own perceptions and value of them for ever.

If he had to look at them for what they were, outside himself, they’d seem so small and tawdry. He didn’t think he’d be able to do it without weeping.

 

The forest was full of hidden life in winter. Under the blanket of snow, all types of creatures nestled. When Neville disturbed their peace, walking through, he heard the ruffle of birds feathers, of huge insects, peeking from their hiding places.

 

In the shade of the treetops, the white snow almost seemed to take on a luminescent quality, the mounds of it dispersed across the ground looked like the tops of huge fungi from afar.

 

Neville had to keep reminding himself, as he floated through, walking on air, head light as a balloon, that he was there for a purpose. That he would not let the forest take him in, couldn’t sit in the nook of a tree branch and wait to be swaddled in snow and spores and vines.

 

There was a river that ran through the forest, in fact there were probably several of them- no one had ever fully mapped the area and certain portions were too dangerous for wizards to even attempt exploration.

 

But Neville knew one that had several tributaries running off into different directions.

 

He could find always find it by following a path- one most would’ve failed to notice but that he’d found from collecting plants- of violet colored claryssow flowers on the ground. They were a very rare bloom, but as resilient as a cockroach. They didn’t wilt under cold or any type of weather, and when plucked or dug up, another would miraculously grow back in the same spot. But they had to be spread in the soil by seed.

 

Neville could only guess how they’d gotten there but the forbidden forest was home to a large number of plants he’d never seen anywhere else in nature.

 

He imagined some type of creature had caught claryssow seeds in its fur and run through the forest, trailing the seeds behind it in a path. And that path lead straight to a portion of the river that broke off into a creek that flowed east.

 

The river was shallow, it was frozen over- snow banks on either side, framed by thin leafless trees with black bark. But the creek flowing from it was not frozen and when Neville bent next to it, the ground was soft, wet.

 

He hadn’t brought any gloves and he dipped his already numb fingers into the creek up to the wrist.

 

Icy pain prickled over his skin and his eyelids fluttered shut. As they did, he could’ve sworn that between his eyelashes he saw the shape of something white moving over his hands, over the water.

 

But when he opened them again, there was nothing- and he thought it must have been snow blowing in the wind, a glimpse caught by his periphary, mistaken for something living.

 

He wiped his hands off on the side of his trousers and opened his rucksack, pulling out the sterling silver chalice and filling it.

 

He cast a quick enchantment over it, to prevent spill. He turned it over once, to see if it had worked, but even if he turned the chalice upside down, not a drop of liquid spilled out. He tossed it back into his pack.

 

The entire walk back through the woods, he could swear he could hear the sound of the water rushing in his ears. He wanted to rush back to the river, and throw himself in.

 

x x x

 

It was Christmas. Neville had spent many Christmas holidays at Hogwarts but none so bleak. He supposed that was childish, selfish, to be mourning that there would be no big tree in the great hall or watching Harry and Ron play chess.

 

Even the few students who remained seemed in no spirit to celebrate. One of the remaining proffessors had put up garlands of holly around the great hall, the hallways, and doorframes- Flitwick he supposed, as he also hadn’t left for the holidays. House elves brought out gingerbread and eggnog for the remaining students but it seemed as if everyone only went through the emotions with a sort of resigned, dutiful, attitude.

 

Neville had mostly been distracting himself by working on his potion. And it really had been work. He’d grown the additional fungi he hadn’t already had in his greenhouse and then had to create the potion in parts- letting different elements of it sit overnight or simmer on a low heat for days at a time.

 

The last ingredient to add was the boiled down crow’s eye. He’d waited until Christmas Eve. His thought behind it was that he had something to look forward to, and who knew- knowing Dizzeria, the potion could very well be a festive one, in some sense if not the more conservative Christmas one.

 

Neville had been antsy the entire day waiting to experiment with it. He hadn’t much else to do anyway. He’d given his regards to the other students and professors who’d stayed on during luncheon, which as a rarity, they’d spent together- the Great Hall ceiling reflecting the steady snowfall that had been continuing outside. He’d noticed that Snape hadn’t come. _Up to something_ , his mind had privately supplied. _Had to be_.

 

He hadn’t seen Snape since their encounter in the potion’s dungeon, which had been over a week ago. He’d been working on something then, ingredients laid out on his desk, things he’d bought from Dogweed and Deathcap, for a specific purpose.

 

Never in his life would he have thought he’d be eager to go back to the potion’s dungeon extracurricularly but he itched to peek back into that office. Even as he worked on his own potion, the thought consumed him.

The physical motion of stirring a cauldron in his muscles, the audible crunch of dried plants under a pestle, the acrid smell of smoke- all only served to make him think of Snape. Not necessarily in a bad way. Like so many things, when he looked back on those times, it didn’t feel negative or positive- just a time where he’d been scared and had had to be strong.

 

He checked his pocket watch and saw it was nearly eleven at night.

 _Soon_. Taking a potion at midnight would give it enhanced effects.

Dizzeria always talked about that. How important time was. How that had been something that was lost on so many modern wizards- once spells had started being taught in text books rather than word of mouth.

 

He’d read once, in history of magic, that there had been a time when all potions had required fresh blood from the wizard brewing it.

It hadn’t been a necessary component to the function of the magic (largely the reason it had stopped being taught as a requirement), it had been for the ritual of it.

A gesture. _I’ve put my everything into this. I’d give my blood for this._

 

Now only dark magic ever seemed to use it.

 

It seemed backwards, somehow. That good magic could be taught to and mastered even by young children, but that black magic required such sacrifice.

Because to be evil, Neville supposed, was easy.

It was a ‘slippery slope’ as they said- frictionless, a surrender.

Being good was surely what required the hard work, goodness was a struggle, like constantly treading water to keep one’s head above it. Evil was letting yourself sink below the surface.

 

Neville stared into the jar of crow’s eyes, and each stared back at him. He had to shut his eyes before he let himself put his hand in.

 

Slippery. Frictionless.

 

It actually took some effort to grasp one between his fingers and pull it out. His whole body felt covered in goosebumps from the texture of it.

 

Out of morbid curiosity he watched it the entire time as it slowly burned down to a liquid in the cauldron.

 

When he poured the eye to the rest of the potion, a flume of white smoke burst from the concoction- a sign that it had been completed properly. He sighed with relief.

 

His hands started shaking when it came to pouring it into a vial to drink from. He didn’t want to take more than the dose Dizzeria listed- after all, he didn’t even know what it did yet. He kept glancing at the clock.

 

One minute to midnight and he began fretting.

 

The vial lay innocuously in front of him on the table but the entire room seemed to revolve around it now, everything else fell out of focus.

 

If he died from it, if his body were to seize up and he choked… no one would hear him.

 

Not with the wind howling against the castle so like a scream already. Not when even Snape hadn’t been seen around the castle in over a week and no one had so much as checked on him or mentioned him.

 

But when the clock struck midnight, he forced himself to hold it up to the light in trembling hands, uncorking it.

 

He tipped his head back to pour it down his throat.

 

Halfway down he remembered how the crow’s eye had looked sizzling against the black of the cauldron and his throat closed up, he gagged.

 

He smashed his hand against his lips and forced it down.

 

Immediately his stomach felt cold and then a sort of numbness settled into his entire throat, mouth, and insides.

 

He couldn’t feel his tongue.

 

He tried to move it, to gasp for air, but felt nothing- not the relief of inhaling nor the stricken feeling of being deprived of air.

 

His hand went up to grasp his throat but it was a struggle and it fell back limp to his side.

 

His whole body went loose limbed and he slumped backward against his chair, his head lolling to one side.

 

When Neville had been a very young child he’d been scared to fall asleep.

Because when he did- he’d reasoned when having to explain his fears to his grandmother- he lost control of his mind and his body.

 

And what was most frightening of all, was that when he fell asleep, he could never remember and never quite anticipate the moment between when he drifted from being awake into being in a dream.

 

One minute, the world around him would be real, and then in a seamless transition that he could never fully recollect the sensation of, he would be inside of his own mind, and the dream would be real.

 

This was not so different. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when and how it happened, but if he had to put it into words it was like his body had been _unbuttoned_.

 

It was like his flesh was the strings of a violin, and the potion had been a bow, pulling everything sideways, until a noise was drawn from it, and that noise had been his spirit.

 

And then Neville was looking down at his own body, asleep and slumped in his chair.

 

 _Am I dead…?_ he wondered and the thoughts echoed throughout the room, more physical than his own sense of being.

 

He’d never seen his own body that way.

 

The strange placement of his freckles- there were some spattered almost too light to notice, by his ear, displaced all the way across his cheekbone, asymmetrical to the other side of his face.

 

The curve of his jaw was gentle and pale, like a hill of snow.

 

His hands looked clumsy, child like.

 

His body was crawling with flower buds, then. One behind the shell of his ear, a tiny pink blossom. A cluster of mushrooms sprouted from each faint freckle on his cheekbone. Vines crawled from his scalp, wrapping around his face and down his arms, twining into his fingers like a held hand.

 

This wasn’t a dream, he realized. In fact, it was the opposite. This was enhanced vision. This was wearing glasses for the first time, when everything came into focus.

 

It did come into focus. He willed it, and he could see the particles of dust settling on the floor. He could see the tiny universe that existed there, where each fleck of dirt was a planet, each knot in the grain of the wood floor a galaxy.

 

Then with a blink he was floating above the school, far in the sky, so far that the Hogwarts castle looked like a toy that he could swat it with his arm if he wanted and send crashing back into building blocks.

 

 _It’s all real,_ he thought with awe. _It’s everything_ , and I’m making it real as I think it, as I will it.

 

He fell back to his greenhouse and moved himself forward.

It wasn’t like walking, nor was it exactly floating.

 

He moved across the room, and through the walls into the hallway, the way a breath exhaled gently moved through the rest of the air in the room.

 

Everything smelled of pine and peppermint when he looked at the garlands of holly draped from the ceiling. And the castle was filled with every christmas carol he’d ever heard, all captured in one singular note that he knew only he could hear.

 

In this bright, clear, new world, memories and the present and the future all existed at once. He touched a red berry nestled in the holly and wasn’t in the hallway of Hogwarts so much as he was in his grandmother’s estate, over fifteen years ago, touching the decorative displays of holly that had been on her dining room table.

 

With a feeling like an inhale he left that place and was in the Gryffindor common room. Several of the students were still awake.

 

One boy, a 15 year old from Wales, who did very poorly in herbology but always made his friends laugh, was telling a ghost story.

 

It was one Neville had heard before. About a woman who thinks her house is being haunted by the spririt of her mother, but it turns out to be a boggart. Three other Gryffindors were listening.

 

Another student was unwrapping a chocolate frog.

Happy little golden sparkles fell from his fingertips as he did it.

He was happy to be with his friends and safe on Christmas Eve and happy to be unwrapping a chocolate. A glow emanated from his skin.

 

There was a girl who’d fallen asleep leaning on her boyfriend. A braid of her hair was thrown over one shoulder, strands of it falling out against her neck.

She was Neville, asleep in the room on the other side of the castle.

She was Ginny, and Hermione, and every other girl Neville had seen asleep in the Gryffindor common room, with their eyelashes casting a shadow on their cheek.

 

As he listened to the boy tell his story, the words began to come out as a type of silvery ectoplasm, and soon the room was filled with every character.

 

The woman, silvery form, constantly readjusting itself- sometimes she had long hair, sometimes short, sometimes she was young, sometimes middle aged- walked around the room.

 

She looked over her shoulder. She looked at Neville. She gasped, when the boy told her to. She flinched when he said she did.

 

And when the boy reported that the ghost or boggart had appeared before her, he really did, tall enough that his spirit body loomed all the way up to the ceiling and he looked down on all of them, bending forward to even fit inside the huge space of the common room. His arms stretched out in front of him and his fingertips curled around, crossing the floor like a long shadow.

 

Neville had had enough of it and so in a blink he was on the Quidditch pitch.

 

The goal hoops were dripping with jagged icicles.

Here he could feel every dissapointment, every victory, every injury, every last minute catch, as if he’d been playing himself.

The stadium seats were covered in a tarp for the winter but surely he could hear the cheers.

 

If he fantasized that his spirit had form, that it could be a body, then he could sit on the tip top of the goal post with his legs dangling down and see the entirety of the field and campus spread out before him.

 

Neville tried to force his focus. It was difficult to consolidate his thoughts, when he could be anwyhere, anything, was seeing everything….

 

He tried to imagine the first time he’d seen Gryffindor win a Quidditch match. If he could pull that memory from the soil under the snow, from the grain of the wooden seats.

 

Everyone had been taller than him then and he’d been squeezed between several other students, standing on his tip toes the entire game to try and get a decent view.

 

The players had just looked like blurs streaking across the sky but some of the blurs were red and others were green.

 

He remembered squinting, screwing up his entire face in focus to try and understand what was going on. He’d never been very good at following sports. Though, he could tell it was important to the students around him.

 

So he’d tried very hard- shielding his eyes against the sun with his hand, trying to follow every streak of color.

 

When the snitch was finally caught, all the bodies pressing against him on every side suddenly leapt into the air and his ears nearly went sore from the whoops of joy and screaming.

 

They’d won- he’d been able to understand that at least. He’d felt it.

 

When he revisited that memory, when he opened his mind past what he’d felt, the collective rapture of every student next to him- it was like looking into the sun.

So bright and golden.

 

It melted him down, he couldn’t maintain the smoke body anymore in the face of such light, and he slid all the way down the goalpost and into the snow.

 

Golden and warm brought him back to the Great Hall. Candles were still lit in honor of Christmas, the glowing light as rich and yellow as a gulp of eggnog.

But he couldn’t stay there either. He floated through the ceiling, the enchanted image of the sky, let the fake snowflakes fall through him, until he was surrounded by real ones, perched on the tip of the highest spire of the castle.

 

He’d never liked flying on a broomstick much, he had no love of great heights, but somehow in this form it felt natural.

 

His entire essence was so weightless, it actually took effort to not fly up even farther.

 

If he didn’t think every few seconds, if he didn’t reintroduce the words “I” and “myself” with every thought, he was in great danger of losing his centralized form and being entirely.

 

The collection of thoughts and feelings that constituted this new self were intermingling with all the other thoughts and feelings around him, and like threads caught on a branch, he could feel the threat of unravelling, of leaving pieces of himself strewn about in every re-experienced memory, every fantasy.

 

His head could just as easily float up to space, to the planets, eating stars whole. While his left foot could be at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, wiggling his toes against the sand, surrounded by cool, liquid, darkness.

 

Neville could feel the cold air then, as he willed his thoughts back together, drew them in tight. The wind rushed around him and snowflakes battered him as if he had skin.

 

It hurt to be in one place at once. Like squeezing one’s self into a tight space when all he wanted was to stretch out.

 

But Neville felt he was starting to get the hang of his new powers. He could see McGonagall. She was reading a book in her bed by candlelight. Her eyes kept drifting closed. She was covered in warm sand, pulling her into dreams.

 

When he kneeled by her bed and put one hand over hers, the warmth she gave off was like a roaring bonfire. Fierce and burning but illuminating- stretching light in all directions, casting sharp black shadows on the ground.

 

He came back, to his spire on the top of the castle and tried once more, to reach out to another life.

It was a bit like fishing. He tossed the thought into space like a lure, a small part of himself carefully tied to the end of a string that led back to his whole. Then he waited for the tug, and carefully reeled back in.

 

The forbidden forest was full of ‘bites’ in that case. Too many creatures eager to nip at his lure.

 

One second he was running a fingertip over the shell of a dark blue beetle, pressing against it with just enough pressure that its legs bent beneath it.

 

The next he was crouched next to a fox, their forms identically poised for a jump. He could feel fur across his back prickle as his ears caught a rustling sound.

 

Or a bird. He could be a bird. With a quick heartbeat and bones so light that it was almost not so different than the floating feeling that had drawn him up to the top of the castle. At any moment the branch beneath him, even the ground below, the entire earth could be gone from under him and it would be of no consequence.

 

Animals, he was realizing, were quite different than the people he’d seen so far- in terms of the aura they gave off.

Each living creature had a sort of solar system around them, that Neville couldn’t see so much as feel.

 

And with the insects, this solar system was quite small and simplistic. Maybe just one moon. They thought of what they knew, they had little experience of a ‘self’ or a grander scheme of the universe but they knew their own role and the connection their direct surrounding environment very well.

 

But every human had whole galaxies surrounding them. Worlds and planets, the very fabric of time and space unspooled and bunched in on itself, all just surrounding the physical body that Neville could see visually.

 

Each solar system and universe around them felt wildly different. Neville knew that even with this enhanced perception he wasn’t anywhere near experiencing them fully. No, not at all. In fact, he was barely experiencing a stray spark from the greater fire of it. It would come in visual images that he saw before him or they could come in tastes, smells, sounds.

 

Even in such a small dose, he thought the gravity of these worlds could easily pull him in. And it made him anxious. _Perhaps this is why human beings have bodies to begin with. Something has to keep us from being swept up in eachother’s orbit._

 

If he tilted his gaze up to the sky, imagining for a moment to ground himself that he had eyes through which he could just look at it through without feeling all of it, as if he had a head he needed to tilt up to be able to see… The night sky was a black velvet curtain that stretched on endlessly in every direction. The stars were indistinguishable from snowflakes- the falling snow could’ve been falling stars, for all he knew. It suddenly felt relatively quite small.

 

Neville imagined himself a heart and lungs. So he could feel the beat, fast and a bit erratic. And his lungs- working hard to draw in deep, satisfying, gasps of brisk winter air after the night’s excursions all around the castle and the forest.

 

When he willed it he could even imagine the feel of his hair being drawn back from his scalp as the wind whipped at it.

 

He’d been out for hours, years, centuries, surely. Neville wondered if he could go anywhere at all. Paris? He’d never been. He could see the Eiffel Tower. Or even further- maybe he could fly someplace where it was daylight and where everyone was awake. Someplace with a huge crowd, where he could feel the auras chattering amongst each other in a din of music and sweet tastes and floral smells.

 

The heart he’d imagined caught in his throat all at once. Because he knew the one place that he did need to go.

 

Neville slipped down through the spire of the castle, oozing down the stone walls, all the way below the ground.

 

His heart, which he’d created out of nothing but space and stardust, would not stop betraying him. It beat too fast, it choked him and ached like a wound. So he told it to leave him and it did, sprouting wings like the bird he’d touched, and flying away from him.

 

 _That’s much better_ , he thought and moved forward. There was no need to worry about the tread of his shoes on the stone floor. He had no feet to step.

 

His lungs, though, too, were beginning to work against him. The breath he was holding was becoming painful. So he let them melt away from his being and seep in a liquid down the cracks of the stone. The memory of them could return back to his physical body.

 

Neville had found himself in the same position he’d been in the last time he’d ventured to this part of the castle.

That feeling of waiting on the other side of a door, and imagining the person on the other side.

 

But this time all it took was that spark of imagining and he’d been pulled, as if chest first by some enchantment, through the door and found himself facing Severus Snape’s back.

 

He was working on something, even this late in the night (or morning). His hands splayed out, long white fingers, on the stone table as he leaned forward, his shoulders sharp in the austere cut of his cloak.

 

Neville circled him slowly, every detail more vivid than he’d ever experienced a person before. The pale angles of his face, and also the places where his face was soft, that Neville had never noticed before- the puff of sleep deprived circles under his eyes, the gentle curve where his lower lip met his chin; the soft, liquid, crescent of his cornea as his eyes scanned the book in front of him.

 

His presence filled the room, because it was his room, and seldom did others visit. Neville flattened himself against the wall as he moved to look at him. He was afraid to get too close to what he could feel was closer to his physical form. That dark galaxy. But he could still feel, the way starlight reached earth across space and time, the hum of his aura.

 

Snape’s heartbeat was as steady and menacing as the heavy thud of a grandfather clock. That was one thing he could feel even from afar.

There was a focus to him in this moment, because he was studying what was in front of him. A calmness over his being that came from years of practice, of competence, and knowledge.

Neville flinched at the intimacy of suddenly feeling the parchment, the raised smoothness of dried ink, as if it were on his own finger, as Snape ran his hand across the page of the book he was looking down at.

 

He knew he needed to go closer, to see what he was doing. The book he was reading from was large but not very old, the parchment was faded but still maintained its color, crispness; and the binding held together. Neville wanted to read it, he knew if he could just touch it, he’d know it, know everything that book had to say.

But he was keeping his own spirit curled in on itself and close to him- at times making it even smaller than his own physical body would be. He imagined a fly on the wall. Every possible universe inside him wrapped and knotted until it could fit on the point of a needle.

 

There were herbs and vials of various mysterious substances on Snape’s table as well. Some type of thick cut salt in a jar, a bottle that seemed to be full of dark green moss, a sheath of freshly cut white flowers.

 

 _Get closer_ , he urged himself, though the knotted humming strands of thought captured in the pinprick form he’d made all seemed to balk at the very notion of it.

 

The more he moved from the wall, the more it felt as though he was sliding across the floor, slightly out of control, slipping.

 

Snape was dripping with liquid all at once in Neville’s vision. Cold water, like he’d just come in from the blizzard and the snow on him had melted under the candle light and seeped into him, frigid and wet. His hair clung to his neck and strands of it stuck to his face, black lines on the curves of his bone structure.

 

There were puddles of water on the ground, Neville saw his own invisible feet making imprints in them. Could feel the cold sharp and painful on his bare soles.

 

Neville could hear the sound of dripping everywhere. From the ceiling, pouring off the desk, from the ends of his air. Everything was soaked, everything was flooded.

 

“Oh” Neville breathed. It was so cold, he was shivering. The flow seemed endless. The closer he got, the deeper the water until he was wading in it. But all the time Snape carried on with his work with a sort of vacant unconcern. He flipped a page and dark water spilled out from his sleeves.

 

The water was up to Neville’s chest and the sound of Snape’s heartbeat was deafening now. Shaking the room, the jars and bottles lining the walls were in danger of slipping off their shelves with every beat.

 

Neville had to put his hands over his ears as he came to stand at the edge of the desk, across from Snape.

 

 _Every river has its source_ , he thought. He remembered the creeks in the forbidden forest. Where he’d gathered the water in the silver chalice. As he leaned forward more water spilled off the desk, making waterfalls on each end.

 

This is where it’s coming from. He stilled at the thought, with one arm outreached, the tip of one finger pressed against Snape’s chest, the left side of his ribcage. The heartbeat reverberated through his finger, achingly down to his bones. And when he placed just a hint more of pressure, water gushed forth from the spot, spilling all the way through the fabric of his cloak and down his front.

 

“Oh, god” Neville whispered, recoiling immediately, drawing his hand back to his own chest. _He’s bleeding out_ , he thought desperately, _he’s bleeding to death_.

 

Snape picked up a knife on the table and began using the flat side of it to crush a sheath of dried berries against parchment paper. His face was still and calm. His eyes blinked mechanically.

 

 _He’s bleeding out and he doesn’t even notice_ , Neville wondered as he crawled on top of the table and jumped off on the other side (with a loud splash), all the time keeping his gaze focused on Snape, maneuvering around him like a statue he was examining at a museum. _Or he doesn’t care because…_. Neville paused, peering up into Snape’s face, _because it’s always like this_.

 

Neville stood behind him, whatever it was that made up the state that he was in was flush against Snape’s back, head leaned over his shoulder to watch his work, cheek against cheek. When Snape blinked, he felt the ends of his eyelashes comb over him.

 

His hands worked with efficient skill, never accidentally cutting his finger or dropping things the way Neville always did. Then he picked up one of the fresh cut flowers and held it up to his face, examining it. Neville examined too.

 

“Convallaria majalis” Neville whispered against Snape’s cheek though he knew the other wouldn’t hear. “You must’ve grown this in a pot. Couldn’t find it outdoors this time of year. Not under all that snow.”

 

Snape picked up the silver knife he’d been using and very carefully, with the plant still inches from his face, made an incision on the stem.

 

Neville winced as if the knife had pricked his own finger but couldn’t help but stare in fascination at the drop of dew that seeped out.

 

Then Snape paused, going completely still. And turned his head.

 

He turned his head toward Neville, and their eyes locked.

 

Snape’s face remained perfectly placid but his eyes were looking into Neville’s. Neville’s blood ran cold. He was suddenly aware once more of how cold the water around him was. His teeth were chattering and as much as he knew it was essential to keep still, he couldn’t stop shaking.

 

Snape’s eyes were looking through him, but his brows knit together as if he were struggling to see.

 

 _He’s spotted me_ , Neville thought hysterically.

 

His eyes were impenetrably dark. Neville imagined that the bottom of the ocean floor was probably the closest estimate to the shade.

 

“Don’t look at me,” he whispered, teeth chattering. “Just look away.”

 

The pupils of his eyes wavered, scanning the area around where Neville floated, as if estimating where he was.

 

“Don’t” Neville whispered again, his voice cracking. His body- he couldn’t move. When had he become so solid? Only hours before he’d felt so light, lighter even than air- just a spirit being carried on the breeze. When had he started being able to sense himself as something nearly solid in space? When had he started having lips and hands and teeth again?

 

He couldn’t remember but now he felt pinned- weighted, under that dark stare. Instead of feeling as though he’d rise to the ceiling, he had to concentrate just to keep from collapsing into the ground like a weight.

 

The water that was still soaking through Snape’s clothes was turning to ice before his eyes. His eyelashes crystalized, his hair matting into chunks.

 

Then his lips parted, that soft curve of his lower lip disturbed, and something crawled from his mouth.

 

A white moth. It stepped onto the edge of his lip and fluttered its wings experimentally. Neville watched in horror. It lighted off its ledge and flew up, wings the color of snow.

 

The sound of Snape’s heartbeat was speeding up to a brisk staccato. Loud as ever. And a discordant sound accompanied it now. It was awful, like strings being plucked forcefully, metal clanging against metal. It was coming from inside his mouth.

 

Snape’s eyes blinked. And his voice spoke out loud, in reality, clear: “….who’s there?”

 

A thousand moths burst from his lips. Filling the room with the wild beating of their wings. All bright white. They flowed from his mouth like a geyser of water. And all the while his expression belayed no awareness of it.

 

Neville screamed. He screamed so loud that he could hear it over the din of the room. He screamed with such force that his body broke apart, into dust on the wings of every moth, until he was everywhere at once, as insubstantial as the sound of the howling wind.

 

For a moment he could’ve sworn that that dust that made him up reached out farther than the castle, stretching out to the stars and back, before it seemed to reach its own limits, and elastically snapped back to Hogwarts.

 

When he crashed back together he felt sore from the impact but light again- able to float once more. Feeling limp and battered, he dragged himself up- through the floors and ceilings until he was in his own study again.

 

He could see his body.

 

 _Please, let me come back_ … Neville prayed. P _lease don’t lock me out yet_ …

 

His body had….moved. His head was slumped forward on the desk. He must have been displaced by something while he’d been gone because he had been face up before. Now he had fallen mostly off his chair, leaning on the desk with one arm out stretched and hanging limp.

 

He imagined knocking on a door. He imagined placing a seed in soil. He imagined wet snow seeping into wool.

His mind drifted back into his body.

 

He gasped as he felt it happen. All at once he was assaulted with the feeling of his clothes against his skin, the soreness in his muscles, of his tongue in his own mouth.

 

He sat up and looked around the room. And began to laugh in hysterical disbelief.

He’d done it. Done what? Everything. It was hard for him to even reason it to himself but it felt as though he’d lived a hundred years in that state and yet he came back to his body and the time wasn’t even-

 

He looked at the clock. 5 in the morning. It had been just 5 short hours! He let out another exhausted whoop of laughter.

 

He stretched his arms and legs out, curling and uncurling his toes experimentally and running his hands through his hair. _Such a wonder_ , he thought to himself rather cheerfully, _that all that I just was can fit in this old thing_.

 

As he breathed he noticed he’d gotten another one of his nosebleeds and he made a noise of frustration, wiping it on the back of his hand and getting to his feet.

 

On a practical note, he cursed himself for not getting a better look at what Snape was working on but somehow in that dream-like state it hadn’t seemed important. So hard to focus.

 

It was worrisome, though, he noted. For a minute there he’d been sure Snape had on some level become aware of his presence.

 

He pushed the thought away and grabbed Dizzeria’s handbook off his desk. He flipped to the index that he’d found after the instructions. The interpretations of symbols.

He let out another laugh at having finally understood why such an index existed.

 

Some of the meanings he’d understood on his own but the book confirmed. The golden brightness he’d experienced on the quidditch pitch had been memories of victory: “certain places will give you a burst of gold that may temporarily stun you. often these places are where people have experienced a great joy or personal achievement.”

 

That fire he’d felt in McGonagall was courage, bravery, the book said: “around a human being it’s a symbol of a fierce and noble heart”.

 

Then he remembered the water…. that flood. He chewed the end of his thumbnail. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Finally against his better judgement he flipped all the way back to the “W” section.

 

“Water is a complex symbol that can be interpreted many ways. First and foremost it stands for emotions. A person who has an aura of water or liquid around them is someone who feels very deeply.”

 

 _Funny_ , Neville thought dryly, _I think of Snape as being about emotional as a brick wall._

 

A more pressing interest was the moths. He shivered to remember them. He’d thought he’d liked moths but not these- they had been terrifying somehow. Or perhaps anything was terrifying in that large a number.

 

He looked up moths and found there were many different colors listed, each with a different meaning. When he scrolled down to white he read:

 

“Moth: _white_. A white moth is an extremely powerful and rare omen. It is a symbol of death. Those who witness this augury and do not heed it as a warning will be doomed. It presents itself only to those who have the power to alter the future.”

 

“shit….” Neville mumbled helplessly under his breath. He ran his hands through his hair nervously as he kept reading.

 

“When the white moth attatches itself to a person, that person has death in their future. Either they are the cause of death, or they themselves are marked for it. However, this is also a symbol of hope.”

 

“What part of that is hopeful…?” Neville whimpered, clasping his hands on either side of his head and slumping forward.

 

Dizzeria had included just enough description in her definition to push him into panic but not enough to make it clear what exactly he was supposed to do.

 

He considered how he’d looked then. The water pumping in the weak rhythm of a heartbeat like blood from his chest. And his own chest filled with icy dread.

 


	5. The Holly and The Ivy

Neville went to breakfast on Christmas morning running on only a few hours of sleep. When he wandered in he had a tuft of tissue paper sticking out of one nostril to plug another one of his nose bleeds.

 

A grand piano had been set up and enchanted to play by itself, so ‘O Christmas Tree’ was audible underneath the sea of chatter. The hall was filled with the warm glow of candle light and the smell of gingerbread and pine needles. Students eagerly laid waste to the wrapping paper on their gifts with hands sticky from candy canes and the professors sipped hot chocolate and conversed with each other in gentle tones. Outside, it was freezing rain. The sky was pitch even in the early hours and rolling waves of harsh weather pelted at the glass windows noisily. The sound of the hail blended with the popping of the children pulling apart their Christmas crackers, a percussion to the piano melody. The tables were laden with plates stacked high with sugar cookies, fruit cakes, and pitchers of hot drinks nestled among wreaths of holly threaded with popcorn and oranges impaled with cloves. The students were vibrant but not unruly- relaxed in their contentment and picturesque with rosy cheeks.

 

Neville felt he was having a panic attack.

 

He’d spent the entirety of his life taking quite for granted that the world was compartmentalized into different forms, into time, into physical property. That the table could not also be the floor and the lights and the rain and a person all at once. That bodies are held together by skin and connected by bones and muscle and that they can’t be expanded or pulled apart without injury. That the present moment was the present moment and the present location the present location, and one couldn’t jump back and forth into the future and then back to the past or from point A to point Z then roundabout to point D. But the orderly, restrained, rules of reality now, of course, seemed nightmarish. The world seemed devastatingly opaque. Every action felt laborious and rigid, slow. Even moving his feet to walk felt like it required an impossible amount of effort.

 

But what was the most unbearable was the distance he felt. He saw the people in the room and realized he knew nothing of them. As mysterious and incomprehensible to him as an outer space creature. There was no language detailed enough in which they could convey to him their thoughts and feelings the way he’d experienced them the night before. He could spend a lifetime in their company and never know them well enough. There would never be enough time. And that filled him with an urgent sense of tragedy. He was in a bubble, separated and finding everything untouchable, just barely out of his reach.

 

Neville awkwardly skirted the edge of the room, heart pounding. He plucked a gingerbread man off one of the centerpieces of treats and snapped its head off at the neck with his teeth, hoping it would be the death with the least amount of prolonged suffering.

 

What had kept him tossing and turning so fitfully were thoughts of Snape and his ‘death aura’ but unfortunately, no amount of recursive and runaway thoughts or hours spent pacing had offered any illumination on the matter. It just led him back to the same horrifying image of Snape’s profile, stilling and then turning slightly, his eyes as he’d looked through Neville, suddenly pinning him with his gaze even in that dream world where everything had felt so fluid and intangible until that moment. Had he known him to be in the dungeon with him? Surely there was no way. Neville’s body hadn’t even been there. But he’d clearly suspected something.

 

‘Who’s there?’ he’d asked. Neville shivered where he stood. He couldn’t think about it without feeling ice water dripping down the back of his neck and the hideous crawling, tickle, of moth’s legs under his skin.

 

Dizzeria said white moths were a symbol of death. In a strange way, Neville felt satisfied. That all those moths had been inside Snape. That all he’d needed to do was reach out and they’d all come bursting forth. Unstoppable and frenzied. He should have felt more worried, but some part of him felt placated. Like his fears had been validated and he’d been proven right. The anxiety of uncertainty was gone and in its wake was the clear path of purpose. He had to prevent Snape from unleashing the death that had poured out of him in that prophetic moment of clarity onto Hogwarts. Only Neville could do it. Only he had the insight. And he didn’t plan on informing anyone else. In fact, he felt possessive of this secret and his duty, now that it was in his custody. Like it was an item to be kept in the box beneath his bed. Tucked away between the jar of eyes and the vials that contained the other doses of the avradoon potion. It was a dangerous secret but it was his- and not many things were.

 

He was vaguely concerned that his time spent in isolation had made him caustic because he uncharacteristically longed to confront Snape. And possibly even, to hurt him.

 

Like an itch that needed to be scratched even if it meant drawing blood.

 

What had happened was that Neville had come frighteningly close to comprehension.

 

Neville had never felt any deep desire to understand or know Snape. He was just a permanent, antagonistic, fixture in his life. He’d never fully considered him. Possibly hadn’t even regarded him as human. Snape was an obstacle, actually. He was a trigger. When he thought of Snape he thought of the way he made him feel, not of who he was. The image in his mind had never been even so much as a physical one (long black robes, dark hair, sallow skin) or an inventory of (unpleasant) personality traits (withering, bitter, condescending, petty) but of Neville’s own reactionary experience to him (the feeling of heat flushing his face, a twist of cold shame in his stomach, his heartrate jumping at the expectation of inevitable mockery).

 

But with the assistance of the potion, of course, things had become more clear. In fact, Neville suspected he’d gotten too close. He’d been afraid of this happening. When he’d drawn close to people, felt the universe of their being, and been effected by their gravity. He’d been left with holes of Snape’s anti matter roiling somewhere within his mind, insatiable. Once he’d had even a glimpse of what it felt like to have his soul touching another’s soul like that, there was nothing to be done. It had been a slip. Like letting oneself submerge fully into water for the first time. The awkwardness of learning to hold one’s breath, to squeeze one’s eyes shut and try not to overthink the liquid filling their ears and nostrils. Then the feeling of encompassment. He’d nearly had that. Maybe for a moment he had- when he stood behind him, watching him touch the freshly picked flowers.

 

And the flood of black water. The heavy rhythm of his heart. That had sent him clawing back from the surface. He’d had the panic one feels when they’ve held themselves under too long and remember that they need to breathe. The beginning of drowning. And then every micro second spent underwater when you want to be in the air seems to last a lifetime. The body moves in slow motion in its labour. Reality had come back like a gasp of fresh air.

 

When he’d been under he’d experienced a deep sense of empathy for Snape. He’d hurt for him. He’d actually pitied him. But upon waking the feeling had faded somewhat, or he’d at least become aware enough to be suspicious of it. Maybe when he was on the potion he was a more pure person (certainly he was more _selfless_ on a fundamental level). But back in the real world, his empathy for Snape was twisted with a cruelty that Snape had been pathetic all along. An invigorating sense that there was no need for him to be afraid anymore because he’d found Snape out, and now Neville was the one with control.

 

He wasn’t sure how he could exert this new found power but he longed for it! He wasn’t sure he could contain the desire to run up to Snape and shout in his face. “You’re just sad! And I feel sorry for you! And I’ve been sad all my life and never once gone out and tried to hurt someone to make myself feel better! You cockroach!”

 

But as Neville scanned his eyes over the great hall he saw no glimpse of Snape among the merry makers. Which was probably for the best. It was hard to imagine Snape among the Christmas festivities, looming like an oversized bat and sneering at the faintest whiff of joy in the air.

 

Neville made a dissapointed hum in the back of his throat and licked the gingerbread crumbs off the end of his fingers.

 

The real world felt horribly passive. He felt antsy and uncomfortable in a way that was more than just a withdrawal symptom. It was terrifying how quickly he’d become accustomed to that power of being able to touch things and immediately become one with them. Off the potion, it was like looking through a glass, with reality on the other side, and his own mind in a little cage.

 

Besides that, he felt physically ill. His joints ached and he was dizzy. Probably the dizziness came from the fact that he had to keep reminding himself to breathe. And his body hurt because every movement felt like an overextertion. Surely walking and remaining upright had never been so difficult in the past.

 

What it all culminated into was a frantic desire to go back. He had one dose left of the avradoon potion before he’d have to brew another. He intended to use it as soon as possible. After all, he assured himself, time could be wasting on figuring out what Snape was up to. If he wasn’t careful, he could lose his hard won advantage.

 

Neville nearly jumped out of his skin when he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. It was McGonagall, smiling gently at him and offering him a mug of cocoa. He accepted it with a forced, nervous smile.

 

“Happy Christmas, Neville.”

 

“Yes, happy Christmas.” Neville choked out awkwardly, cradling the mug between his cold fingers.

 

Her hand stayed where it was firmly on his shoulder and she looked at him rather sternly.

 

“You have been taking care of yourself, haven’t you?” she asked, almost a hint of threat in her voice- as if she were asking for late homework.

 

He nodded vigorously but her gaze didn’t waver. She didn’t believe him. Of course she wouldn’t. He was pale as a ghost with circles under his eyes and he had a piece of bloody tissue in his nose. He’d barely slept in… he couldn’t remember how long, really, since he’d had a restful and quiet night’s sleep. His brain helpfully provided an image of “Voldemort’s Return” splashed across the Daily Prophet. Yes, probably not since then, likely…

 

McGonagall’s brittle fingers gave his shoulder another light squeeze and she made a small noise of disapproval before letting him go.

 

“I’m glad to have you here, you know.” she said quietly, and without looking at him. She was staring out across the great hall, her gaze going over the huddles of students out past the door to some unknown point. “Despite everything, this place can be a stronghold. It only requires a few strong people. I’ve always felt safe at Hogwarts. If I-“

 

She paused to breathe and turned her attention back to him and nodded once.

 

“If some of the others- of your class- have left, then I’m sure they’re needed elsewhere. But you’re needed here. I’ve always known a time would come when all of you would have to grow up and face the darkness I just-“ she sighed again. “I never thought it would be so soon.”

 

Neville stared down into his mug of cocoa. There was a single marshmallow floating in it.

 

“All of you, you turned out so strong-“ McGonagall’s voice strained at the last word and Neville found it even harder to look up. He was embarassed for he felt he wasn’t strong at all. Weak and unready to face any type of darkness.

 

 

Neville thought of that warm, steady, fire he’d seen burning in her. There were so many things he didn’t know about her. What were her fears, her memories, her great loves, her great regrets.

 

Only a few feet away from her, where all those great passions and memories and feelings were stored, yet they were totally inaccessible. She couldn’t reach out to him and warm his soul any more than he could hers, even in a time when it seemed people were most secluding themselves, most in need of comfort. Not even on christmas.

 

The warm fire he’d seen around her could no longer warm him, not in reality. Even if he wanted to collapse against her, he couldn’t, he would gain no comfort or solace.

 

Neville stepped closer to her and clasped her hands in his and gave her a warm smile though his lips trembled through it. “It will be a new year soon, professor.” he could hear the croak in his voice.

 

His eyes were hot and prickling with tears. She was looking at him with great concern. He could only imagine what she thought of him. That he was cracking.

 

\- - -

 

The potion numbed his tongue and then he was splitting at the seams, spiraling, kissing the cold cheek of the body he’d left slumped on his bed.

 

The world through the avradoon potion seemed even more chaotic and overstimulating than before somehow. Last time had been his first exposure to it, but this second time it was brighter and louder for the brief period he’d spent without it. His desperation to return made everything pierce much deeper and he felt awash in an ocean of grateful tears until his entire existence was the smell of salt.

 

He knew he should be doing something. Something important. But he couldn’t remember what. It hurt to not remember. But everything was happening all at once. He was riding the shadows that danced across the floor under candle light. Each like a beast that bucked beneath him.

Then he wasn’t in the castle at all, but in the yellow shed he’d visited as a child, exploring the estate’s near his grandmother’s home. And the shed was surrounded by thick forest and weeds and wild flowers. And among the weeds and stones were white flowers and tiny, tiny, strawberries, red as the blood from a pricked finger.

But the flower petals were as white as bone, as piano keys, playing themselves to the melody of O Christmas Tree. And Neville wondered if time was on as sure a track as the enchanted piano, the keys moving to a pre-ordained melody, that one could only understand once the song had ended, never in the moment when the first note was struck.

 

But he knew there was some note he needed to strike but he couldn’t place the melody. He was lost and he wasn’t sure how to rediscover the path he needed to be on. It was terribly frustrating. He couldn’t relax until he remembered. But he couldn’t remember until his thoughts were less clear and clouded with anxiety.

 

Freezing rain beat at the sides of the castle and he remembered the antique, sharp, smell that always greeted him when he moved back into the Gryffindor dormitory after a long summer spent away. How it had faded the more time he’d spent there, and then come back sharp to his senses and musty whenever a great rain came. And it was like staying someplace for the first time again. Like he was on a trip. An adventure. And he slept better for it. Thinking that he was only staying for a moment. Just until dawn, when he’d set out again for someplace new.

 

Neville wanted to go someplace new but something told him that it was forbidden. He was needed here at the castle. Hadn’t he been told as much? He wanted to be at the ocean and in the jungle and climb up a high mountain but he was afraid that if he strayed too far that he would lose his way back. And if he kept moving forward, what would happen to the things he’d left behind? Would they dry up behind him, irretrievable? So he kept looping back in his wanderings, re-asserting what had happened, what he’d felt and seen and heard, to ensure that those memories would never fade away. Someone had to hold onto them. And they belonged only to him. Entrusted in his mind and it was his responsibility to keep them tidy and feeling well loved.

 

He began to move through the castle halls but they were different now, deeply entrenched in vines and climbing ivy and fungi. This was his place now. All of it. And flowers bloomed at his touch. He had no feet but he called forth the sensation of his toes sinking into damp moss as he made his path. There was always damp moss by the Great Lake. Neville used to sit by it with his pants rolled up to the knees and his tie loosened, with all the other Gryfindors of his class. And in moments like that he’d almost felt normal- almost part of their posse. Bright sunlight, glittering water, mud soaked trousers, and squeezing wet feet back into dress shoes, had a way of fostering a heady camaraderie. But Neville never went more than ankle deep into the water. He was afraid of the squid. But he also felt badly for being afraid of the squid. It wasn’t her fault that she was frightening. And it worried him that his unspoken fear might somehow be felt by her and that she would be hurt by it.

 

As he moved through the hall, the friends he’d had then passed by like ghosts. Their cloaks folded under their arms and their sleeves rolled up. Laughing and bumping their shoulders. They nodded at him and waved as they walked past, as if they were really there and on their way to class. But they could just as easily be students Neville taught. Who seemed so eerily familiar. Going through the same struggles and victories that had once seemed unique to his class in his own mind.

He only had to think of them to feel them as they were in such close physical proximity. Wallace Ragby, Gryffindor, second year, a decent herbology student. He was spending his Christmas holidays at Hogwarts because his parents were in an underground resistance movement against Voldemort. They wanted him to be safe. He was in his room, staring out the window and feeling restless. He hated the feeling of cold floors on his bare feet. He wanted to be anywhere but here. Judith Arrin, poor at herbology, Ravenclaw, spending her holidays at Hogwarts because her sister was a death eater and her parents didn’t condemn her for it. She was sound asleep. She was dreaming about a white horse and blackberry jam. Winifred Corinth, gryffindor, always got dirt everywhere when she had to work with the plants, was staying at Hogwarts for the holidays because she felt bad for Judith Arrin and wanted to keep her company- she’d been in love with her for three years and was hoping she would notice. In her dreams, she had straighter teeth and longer hair and her hands didn’t sweat at all when Judith asked her to go for a walk.

 

Neville had never had the benefit of any powerful young love and he lingered in Winifred’s thoughts for a few moments longer, letting the hallway he was centering himself in (as much as it could be called a hallway for the longer he stayed there the more it teemed with plant life until it resembled a tunnel of moss and vines) bloom with roses and pink carnations to add to the white strawberry blossoms.

 

The air smelled sweet and florid and his mouth tasted like honey and his chest felt full of hummingbirds- his heart ripe with nectar. Judith and Winifred, as they were in Winifred’s dream, walked hand in hand. Winifred turned Judith in a spin, then held her as they swayed back and forth to no music at all. Then as Neville released himself from the hold of Winifred’s fantasy, their forms became softer, lighter, until they drifted away from his mind like flower petals in the wind.

 

Neville thought it might be dangerous to linger too long at any one person’s thoughts. After all, it had happened to him before. Something. He couldn’t remember what. He was kneeling to watch a lily poking itself out of the moss on the ground, the growth process accelerated as its’ stem pushed upward and the blossom unfurled. Something had happened when he’d come too close.

A white butterfly landed on his knuckles and bat its wings gently. It was familiar but not close enough. Frustratingly, the thoughts kept escaping him. Like he was chasing after someone in a maze and he could hear their footsteps just on the other side of the wall. What had it been?

 

Something cold trickled down the back of his neck and his heart jolted. He jumped off of where he’d been kneeling by the flower, up out of any sense of body, throwing himself against the walls of the room, shivering in all directions. Like boiling water poured on an ice cube, he turned to steam and clouded the air.

 

He was trembling, something in him was trying to crawl out, scratching his insides as it went. He forced his thoughts away from the sensation and then everything hit him from all sides. Tree bark under his fingernails, a feather against his cheek, a grief that made his heart ache, a joy that made him feel invincible, every thought and feeling and sensation in the castle flooded him.

 

It was like being in the ocean. Waves kept cresting over his head, filling his nose and mouth and choking him. The tide throwing his body asunder in the relentless flood. A baby was crying, a page was being turned, a drop of honey on his elbow, a loose tooth wiggled with the tip of his tongue. Neville had no more skin, no name, no face. Everything was turmoil. Some part of him remained, some essence that defied language that desperately struggled against the ocean of memories and feelings. It reached out to grasp anything that could anchor him. His hands flew over the surface of the waves, hands clenching and unclenching frantically for any type of support to keep him afloat. His fingers closed around a small item.

 

It was a button. He stared down at it. In the center of his palm, almost lonely looking in its smallness and insignificance. It was brown and dull and had a frayed piece of thread still attatched to it. He recognized it but at first couldn’t place where from. He turned it over in his fingers, rubbing his thumb across the surface. That felt familiar.

 

When he looked up from his hand he saw a bouquet of flowers on a night stand. Daisies, carnations, roses, and strawberry flowers. What were strawberry flowers doing there? Poked inbetween the other more flamboyant blooms like an accident. Already wilting. Tiny stems not even reaching the water in the vase.

They were there because Neville had put them there. Because he was ten years old and he was visiting his parents.

 

He’d picked them from the garden because they’d been small and lovely but they’d paled in comparison to the bouquet his grandmother had brought. His grandmother had been generous enough to place them in between the other flowers. She could be quite kind sometimes. Even though they detracted from the overall presentation. But when they’d walked into the room, the first ones that his mother had reached out and touched had been the strawberry blossoms. Running the tips of her fingers around their petals and smiling faintly.

 

Then she’d taken his hand and unfurled his fingers. She’d calmly ripped a button from the front of her shirt (his grandmother had made a ‘tsk’ of dissaproval from behind them) and placed it in Neville’s palm and closed his hand around it. It was one of the first of many gifts he’d received from her over the years. And it still lay in the box he kept underneath his bed. He’d run his thumb over it a million times, closing his eyes and emptying his thoughts, wondering if this was how they experienced the world- nothing but the chaos of sensation, anchored to nothing- if they gave him those items because they were their whole world.

 

Neville was standing by their beds, the vines and moss and wild flowers of the tunnel he’d created still forming a nest around them. But he had a form now, not caught up in everyone else. All he could feel was this moment, this dream….. This was the memory that he’d found when he’d gone looking for his center.

 

His mother and father were smiling at him. Their eyes looking past him as usual. He could hear the waves of the ocean of sensation battering their sanctuary from every side, like they were in the bowels of a ship in a storm. He knew that if he reached out to them, that the water would flood in. The way it had been threatning to do all his life.

 

He swiped a tear away from his cheek. He was sore.

 

His mother extended her arm toward him. He could see all the green arteries under her translucent skin. The crashing outside their tunnel was becoming unbearably loud. Any moment, something would start to drip, he was sure, and then the holes would keep getting bigger until there was nothing holding them together there.

 

“Stay.” his mother whispered.

 

Neville took one step forward. Then something gripped his shoulder tightly and he couldn’t move. He gasped for air, choking and flailing his arms as he tried to move closer to his mother, who continued to stare past him. But the hand on his shoulder held him firm and he hated them, he hated them. But he didn’t want to turn around because he knew if he did, his mother’s face would be gone the next time he looked.

 

“It isn’t safe here.” a voice like water caught in his ear after a long day of swimming warned. And Snape’s spindly fingers dug into his shoulder.

 

“Let go of me.” Neville bit back between gritted teeth, not even blinking. His mother smiled serenely.

 

Snape’s arms were strong, the only thing real in a garden of illusions and memories. They pinned the body Neville had made for himself back, forcing it into substance that he couldn’t wriggle out of no matter how hard he willed or imagined it.

 

“You don’t know anything, you can’t even see it, can’t even-“ he began to hyperventilate desperately, his eyes watering from not blinking, his vision going blurred and painful. “Stop! Stop!”

 

But then his own eyes were the one that betrayed him, shutting finally, re-opening with tears clinging to his lashes like great dew drops and his mother and father were far away like down a long winding hall.

 

“Damn it!” Neville yelled. “Damn!”

 

But Snape forced him around, turning him and Neville saw the terrifying solidness of him, all of the tricks of his mind melting and fading psychedelically around Snape’s dark and sharp image form. Realer than Neville could ever hope to be. Shaking him by the shoulders. Like something broken through a veil. He felt his eyes hurt and strained to adjust to seeing him.

 

“How long have you been here?!” he shouted at him, his voice booming so loud Neville thought it would shatter his eardrums.

 

But he would not be chastised at this moment and swatted against Snape’s grip on his shoulders, then punched ineffectively at his chest, squirming to break free.

“Damn you! Damn you!” he shouted over whatever Snape was saying, pushing at him and kicking him until he felt himself slip through his fingers like water and he sunk to the floor, loose limbed and miserable. He couldn’t recall ever hating someone so much because he couldn’t remember a time he’d been so deeply and personally wronged as to have been robbed of a moment with-

 

“I can barely- can you hear me? Are you-“ Snape’s eyes drifted around and he swung his arms out once, twice, in front of Neville’s face as if he was trying to catch a bug. It was almost humorous.

 

Neville sighed, putting his face in his hands and shook his head. Then by chance Snape’s hand caught against him, his fingers landing agains his neck. And he slowly, blindly, reached out, feeling with cold, icy, little fingertips across the line of his jaw, then grasping loosely at a lock of his hair.

 

When Neville looked up wearily, Snape was staring blankly ahead, unseeing, his eyebrows furrowing every few seconds in confusion then relaxing in understanding as he felt at the curvatures and details of Neville’s face and head with his hands.

 

“You can’t stay here. You’re not well.” Snape said softly, still reaching out with his hands.

 

Neville shook him off, standing up. Tears in his eyes. He was furious, he thought. This was what furious felt like. All his life he’d felt nothing but glimpses of impotent rage that he’d always had to bottle up. But here in this form he felt his entire body was fire, sparklers bouncing off the walls, nothing but thrumming blood and fists.

 

“You can’t keep taking everything away from me!” he screamed. And the shock of it, just his voice, sent Snape flying back. As if he’d been hit in the chest with a spell. And he landed on the floor several feet away.

 

“I’ll never forgive you! For any of it!” Neville heard his own voice quavering- sad, frightened.

 

The fire began to drip into water, puddling at his feet, and it drained him of his energy, sinking to the floor once more.

 

He couldn’t go on like this. It hurt. He sniffed and crawled foreward, examining Snape’s body. He was unconscious but didn’t seem harmed. He could hear his pulse, loud as if it was a song being played in the room. Neville leaned in close to him, straddling his chest to examine his face. And in his sleep, his lips parted.

 

The next thing Neville knew he was flying down a corridor of moss and vines, growing and climbing the walls as he moved. Drawn away from Snape, pulled down the hallway and back on the route he’d come. Through thick canopies of plants and floors of moss he tried to find the staircase up to his bedroom. He could recognize the castle somehow even underneath the new life that was overflowing from the cracks in the walls. As if it had always been that way.

 

Finally he reached his spiral staircase up to his bedroom but the door was already open. He knew he hadn’t left it that way. Scaling up the stairs slowly, nearly blinded by the light from the open doorway, he keps both hands on the walls to balance himself. When he reached inside, he found that things were not as he had left them. His body wasn’t laying on the bed peacefully as he had been before he had taken the potion. It was nowhere to be seen.


End file.
